New Friends

Chapter one of MGC, my Skyrim fanfiction xD Please help me weed out my mistakes by leaving reviews!

New Friends


I’m about to have a life-or-death battle with someone I’ve known since I was a child. Someone I’ve thought of as a parent, of sorts. She raised me. She picked me up off the streets and gave me a way to survive. She’s someone, needless to say, who is very close to me. 
I only hope I can kill her before she kills me.
Let me back up a tiny bit. She has someone important to me. She’s going to kill them, but first, she’s going to do worse than that. Much worse. And I would kill her a million times over to keep that from happening.
But back to the current situation.
I have my katana clenched in my fist and can feel the menuki digging into my sweaty palm as I circle the room opposite the woman I have known since the beginning of my life here, in this shadowed cavern where one of us is about to die and, ironically, where my life as an assassin began.
Oh yes, I’m an assassin. But I don’t work for the Brotherhood. They’re infinitely more well-known. My guild is a private, secret and ancient association put together by the ancestors of Ignatius Craven and his family, who you’ve never heard of. I’ll get to that later. Because of this, our group’s influence is limited to one city, because it’s mostly under the control of our Family. It also happens to be the same place where I grew up. Don’t bother asking the name. You probably wouldn’t recognize it anyway.
The jarl really doesn’t care what goes on here. As long as the Cravens keep everything stable, he can go get drunk and do whatever he wants. The idiot probably hasn’t even noticed that they’ve practically stolen the city right out from under him. One day, it just went from managing the people to ruling them. Almost no one protested because the Cravens were careful not to make any big changes, aside from their yearly income.
But Ignatius Capricorn didn’t like the way the Cravens had manipulated their way into power. He would send his followers out to preach against the unrightfully appointed new authority and occasionally even come out himself to explain his views. If you ask me, he was just jealous of our Family’s power. People tell me it’s impossible for me to look at such a situation without bias, but I disagree"just because I killed him doesn’t mean I can’t be impartial, right?
But I digress. You probably want to know how it all came to this. So I’ll start from the beginning. Not the very beginning, mind you, but the first day. The day things started to go crazy.
I remember it like it was yesterday, of course. A young assassin on a mission. Her helpless prey was buying meat in the marketplace. She took note of what her target was wearing"a loose, pale grey tunic with short puffed sleeves and a hood attached along with tan leather pants and lace-up boots"and stayed out of sight, waiting until the woman left town and started her routine trip into the forest. The different shades of white, grey and icy blue snow on the trees and on the ground blended perfectly with the color of her tunic as she continued her purposeful stride down the snowflake-littered trail.
Suddenly, she stopped, cocking her head towards something she must’ve seen on the opposite side of the trail from where the clever assassin lay in wait. This would be a good opportunity to sneak up behind her and finish her. The woman put down her basket for a moment to go investigate. The assassin briefly wondered what could have distracted her target so before trailing her into the trees.
As the assassin slipped through the underbrush, she froze suddenly. The woman was nowhere in sight. She looked back to check and see if the supplies had been left on the road. They were still there. Her target must just be further on"she wouldn’t have left her food behind to be eaten by animals. The assassin moved on, carefully surveying her surroundings as she had been trained, trying to pick out any tracks in the thin snow that would place her back on track.
And then pain exploded at the base of her skull.
The last thing she saw before blacking out was a pair of laced-up fur boots standing over her.
I dropped the short log I held in my hands as I bent down to search my would-be assassin for anything along the lines of a bounty note. Sure, I could have used the dagger under my tunic, but it was more fun to just smack her over the head. She needed a good smacking. Filthy amateur.
I stood, empty-handed. This was odd. There was nothing on her but her weapons. Most bounty-hunters brought the posters with them to compare facial features or form of attire. And anyway, if I had a bounty, I would know. And I would probably be dead, at the hands of my own guild. We don’t suffer people stupid enough to get their faces plastered on a “wanted” poster. And sure, the Church-mouse--that's what the people called me, even if they had never seen me they knew my kills--had one hell of a bounty on her head, but I didn't.
It just didn’t add up. There had to be something on her that I hadn’t found, something that would explain why someone of my same occupation would be chasing me through the forest. Unless"
I was a thought too late to avoid the huge pair of hands pinning my arms to my back. I didn’t struggle"I knew with someone this strong, it was only going to get my arms broken. I sighed as my attacker shifted his grip on my wrists to reach around and start feeling me for weapons.
“So. Can I ask who sent you?”
Silence.
“I’ll take that as a maybe. Say, my hair’s in my face a little bit. And do you mind repositioning my arms some? They kinda hurt at the sockets where they are, right now.”
More silence. He was still checking me for weapons, and he did not seem to care where his hands went.
“All I had on me was the knife. You can stop that. In fact, I would prefer if you did.”
His weight abruptly shifted as he reached around to savagely grab my breast, at the same time pushing my blond hair away from my neck with his unshaved chin and pressing his mouth to my ear.
“Shut up.”
I would have replied if I hadn’t been preoccupied with the intense hurt lancing up my arms. To make up for moving one of his hands from my crossed wrists, he had used the remaining one to shove them up higher on my back, causing my arm sockets to scream in protest. I winced. I had been trained to resist pain in the years since the guild leader had taken me in, but that didn’t mean I no longer found it unpleasant.
After a moment, his hand moved away from my now-aching chest, and I felt it return to holding my wrists behind my back. I dug my heels into the ground as he started dragging me away back towards the trail, grunting with the effort of resisting him as I twisted to get better leverage over my feet. This was not what I had expected. Why wasn’t he killing me already? My escape depended upon him moving at least one of his hands off of me so I had a chance to get out of his reach.
“Where are you taking me? Don’t you have the stomach to pull out a blade and gut me yourself?”
He didn’t answer. I continued, my feet dragging in the snow.
“Do you get squeamish? I bet you have to have your wife do it for you or something. ‘Excuse me, dear, could you kill this helpless woman for me? We need the bounty money because it’s my time of the month, so I need to go to market to buy sponges.’”
His reaction was what I needed. I felt one of his hands come off my arms as he spun me around and struck me across the face, hard. With the angle his arm was now in, trying to keep my own pinned to my back while facing me, I had the advantage. I felt warm blood start to trickle down my chin as I rammed my knee into his groin in reply, his scream echoing through the still forest.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see the hand that wasn’t comforting his crotch reach to his belt and retrieve the dagger sheathed there. By the time its blade was out in the open and traveling towards me, it was too late.
I staggered back in time to avoid an immediately lethal slice. I looked down and observed the blood quickly staining my wrinkled tunic before placing my palm over the wounded area and backing further out of my attacker’s reach. He was trying to recover, and obviously having a hard time of it. I tripped over something in the road, falling on my rump with the booby trap between my legs. It was my bundle of food. I snatched the edge of a cracker peeking out from inside and popped it into my mouth, scooting myself backwards through the piles of wet flakes as I did so.
What? I was hungry. 
Anyway, when my eyes went back to the second assassin, he looked like he had given up trying to stand up straight and was going to make a dive for me before I could get entirely out of his reach. I knew there was a good chance he would get to me if he tried that at this distance, and that if he did, that dagger was going to go straight into my ribs. I was in a tight spot, and, I’ll be honest, I was a little nervous.
Until I saw him stand rigid with agony as two inches of steel sprouted from his chest.
His body collapsed, and in its place stood my savior"the tall, hooded figure of a woman in tight-fitting burgundy armor, holding the instrument of my assassin’s doom. Yellow eyes glowered from beneath the darkness of her cowl, eyes that glowed even in the daylight. Eyes that seemed to stare back at you from beyond the veil, heralding death and destruction.
“Divines’ sakes,” I growled, spitting out blood from the corner of my mouth, “what in Oblivion took you so long?”

Reviews

[EurasianFlavour]

There's one part in the middle of the piece that gets kind of confusing. Starting from here: "I remember it like it was yesterday, of course. " Upon first read, it sounds like you switched to 3rd person, then back to 1st person. But it's just hard to keep track of who's the assassin and who is the target? I'm not sure who is talking. Is the narrator (an assassin) stalking another woman assassin. hits her in the head, and then gets hit in the head herself by a man? I think since they are both women, all of your pronouns are getting confused.

[Lemunculus]

Yeah lol I was reading it over and noticed the same thing myself, the thing is I think I still don't know how I want to tell her story! That might be the problem. But anyway it's meant to be that you keep thinking about the story as if she's telling it to you right now. So she starts off the story in third person, trying to throw you off and make you think that she is the assassin she's speaking of in third person. Then you find out she was actually the target and she continues in first person. In this stage of the writing it's pretty rough I know so thank you for your review to help me make it better in the final draft!

[easybreezy]

I'm not familiar with Skyrim, but this is good. You describe what's happening in great detail. The emotions are a bit stilted, but the fact that she is telling a story that already happened makes that okay. Good job!

[Lemunculus]

Thank you! Do you know what I could do to make the emotions seem more real?

[easybreezy]

I don't know what to say specifically. It just comes across like someone sitting down calmly and telling me a story. Maybe if you wrote it like it is happening in the moment, it would give the writing more intensity and realism. You could put the beginning part as is but make it a prologue. Then put yourself and the reader right smack dab in the moment. I think you'll find it will help.

[Lemunculus]

Okay, thank you! I will definitely try that.