A World of Her Own, An Oblivion Fanfic Options

[Shishi089]

Well, I don't think I'm a very good writer, but here goes...

A World of Her Own

An Oblivion Fanfiction


Prologue

I knew why I was in there, but I didn’t know whether I’d ever get out…

She couldn’t truly tell how long she had been there. The days had melted into weeks, and the weeks into months. How long had it been? A month? Two? Five? A hundred? She could no longer tell. She may have been in there for years, to her knowledge. All she knew was that she had been in there for far too long by her own standards.

She was alone in that cell, except, perhaps, for the few remaining bones of the last prisoner who had been kept there. They lay in the corner of her cell, and she refused to go near them. She tried not to look at them while she lived there--they seemed to remind her hauntingly of what her future probably held. She tried not to think about that, either. She would sit on the chair in her cell, or at the table. She would walk around as much of her cell as she could(always avoiding that one corner). She would sleep on her cot and eat her meager meals and drink her putrid water. She would listen to what the guards said…or didn’t say. They never told her anything important--like how long she was to be in there or when they would kill her, if that’s what they planned to do. All the while, she struggled vainly to not think about her future, a future that seemed very bleak form her position.

She was young--only about twenty years old. She had pale skin and rather delicate features that contrasted slightly with her cold, clear eyes, which had grown somewhat dark during the time she had spent in the Imperial Prison. Her long black hair was tangled and hung lank and dirty around her shoulders. Her smooth, pale hands were scratched and raw from her constantly trying to remove the shackles from her wrists, or from clawing at the bars that stood at her window. She knew it was a futile effort, but she would have done anything to escape that foul, dirty prison.

The Dunmer across from her cell had picked her out as a Breton right away. He, too, had become a nuisance, in his own way. She had hated the silence in the beginning, and his voice had, in a way, brought her a certain measure of comfort at first. He reminded her that she was not alone, that she hadn’t died yet, and that there was another world out there, beyond her little cell. His insults were meaningless to her--she had already suffered enough of those from some of the crueler guards. However, she hadn’t been prepared for his icy words that one day.

“You’re going to die in here, Breton.” He had hissed at her, one evening(or had it been morning…? She could never tell anymore…). It was the first words he had said to her in some time--as if he had gotten bored with trying to get a rise out of her. She herself had expected that she would die in there--that is why she refused to look at the bones that lay in the corner, or did her best to not think about what was going to happen to her. She knew it, in the back of her mind. However, when he had voiced it aloud to her, it was as if something in her mind had snapped in place…or perhaps broken loose. The walls seemed smaller, like they were closing in on her. She seemed to have fallen into some sort of dark pit that wouldn’t allow her to escape. When he had uttered those words, they had suddenly and drastically become a reality, and it made her want to scream inside.

The Dunmer knew he had hit the mark when he had said that, and now repeated those words often. “You’re going to die in here, Breton. You’re going to die!” Some may have gotten used to it--learned to ignore him, or accept it. However, no matter how many times he hissed those words at her, she never became accustom to them. Each time, she felt the fear, and the madness, tear at her insides. Each time, she felt the walls draw closer, and the darkness grow thicker. Each time, she felt afraid.

As she lay there on her bed, her stomach aching with hunger, her mind flitted back to the events that had brought her there, to that place…that hell. She remembered them all too well…though, like the bones in the corner, she did her best not to think of those events, or acknowledge them. To her, they were linked too closely to her family…and how it fell into chaos.

Still, when she lay in bed, while drifting off to sleep, she would picture his face--a Imperialist, broad and strong, and handsome, like his son’s had been. Dark hair, and dark eyes. They had shared the same nose and mouth, the son and father had.

When she had fought off those wolves in the forest, she had been temporarily grateful that a passing guard had stopped while out on his travels to lend a hand. It hadn’t been too much trouble--just a couple of scrawny pack-mates, looking to make a meal out of her. However, when she had turned to him, to look at him, brushing her hair out of her eyes, she knew right away who it was. She recognized him instantly--and he, her. Though years, many years, had passed since that terrible day, he had probably never forgotten her, no matter how much she had changed.

Her. Fai L. Kumara. The girl who had murdered his son.

She had been so shocked to see him that she was taken aback, as was he. He looked so very much like that young man had that she knew him right away. It took only a moment for her to regain her senses and attempt to flee, but that had been a moment too late.

If another guard had not arrived, she suspected he would have killed her. She felt his steely blade strike her legs, his large, rough hands wrap around her throat. Everything, for a moment in time, seemed to stop--to fade away into darkness. For a moment, she felt and saw nothing at all, except the inky black.

That quickly disappeared as she was brought back to earth, gasping for air and grabbing her wounded legs. The other guardsman had pulled him off of her, and was shouting at him. She would have tried to flee then, but her leg was badly damaged from the Imperialist’s sword. She could do very little as they spoke to each other, looked at her, and decided what to do.

It didn’t take long until she was where she was now. Locked in a cell, in the very bowels of the Imperial City.

Strangely enough, she did not hate the man that had put her there, that had tried to kill her. No, quite the opposite--she could never have hated him. He and her, they shared something in common. They had both lost their families, or at least he had lost a member of his, and knew the pain that it caused. She felt close to that man, or as close as she could feel to anyone, as she herself was quite a solitary creature. It didn’t have to make sense to an outsider. She was not one who could be made sense of. She was her own person, her heart and mind a catacomb of intense thoughts and feelings, though she seemed not so on the outside. In her own way, she felt…connected to him, that man. She knew not his name, or where he was, or what he was like. She knew nothing about him at all…except for the fact that they were tied, bound, by similar pain.

Pain that had been brought on to her, and that she, in return, had caused him.

She never thought about the details anymore. She had lived a happy early childhood, with her parents and baby brother and the animals they had on their farm. She had been content at one point, as a sweet, gentle, and naïve child, nothing like the young woman she was now. It wasn’t until she was about seven that things changed. She lost first her father, and then her mother. She had loved her parents both very much. However, as much as she loved them, she had loved her little brother that much more. She made it her duty to watch over him, and protect him. Others might have laughed, but she had turned into more of a mother figure towards him. She worried about him, cared for him, wanted him to grow strong, and be happier than anyone else in the world. She wanted him to have the very best, and did as much as she could for him. And then…

…and then it all ended, before she could stop it.

What could have happened that would have changed her so much? That would have caused her to murder another human being? Life is what happened. Reality is what happened. Death is what happened.

The death of her little brother, the one person she would have given the world for. And that death ached inside of her, even now, as she sat alone in that dungeon, trying not to think about it. It ached like an old wound that never healed.

She had not killed the man for revenge. No, it was not he that had taken her beloved brother’s life. That crime lay not with him, but with another. Why, then, had she killed him? Perhaps it had been out of desperation, the desperation of a fourteen-year-old girl who wanted nothing more than to protect the only person she had left. And that desperation drover her to kill, before she even realized what she had been doing.

So there she sat, in that stinking prison cell, an outcast, labeled a murderer by others. And there she would die, like an animal in a cage. She knew it, as much as the Dunmer knew it. It was accepting it that was the hard part.

Her name was Fai. Fai L. Kumara. Had she known what awaited her when she was out of there, perhaps she would have foolishly chosen to stay in the prison instead.

For, unbeknownst to her, she was about to become a big part of history.

This post has been edited by Shishi089: May 15 2006, 03:08 AM

[Shishi089]

Chapter One: Prison Break


Things had begun to take a very odd turn…and whether good or ill would come of it, I did not yet know…

Days passed as they usually did--colorless and dark, with little or no meaning to them. They seemed to pass both slowly and in an instant, blending in with the other days that had gone by. Fai Kumara seemed to be watching her life drift by, both slowly and quickly, unable to hold onto it as it flowed through her fingertips, like water in cupped hands. As the days went on, she felt more and more anger develop. At what, it was impossible to tell…though it was as if something was growing inside of her, desperate to burst out, like a large scaly monster. If Fai had thought about it more deeply, she would have suspected she were going mad. It was not unusual for people to, after a time, loose their sense in that place. She was more of a free-spirited person, and disliked being in one place for too long. To her, being caged as such was agonizing, and she slowly, in the back of her mind, began to wish for the death she knew would come.

However, one day that changed. One day, as she sat alone in her cell, her life took a very different route, a route she never would have thought or suspected it could.

It was the day Fai met Emperor Uriel Septim.

The guards unexpectedly paid a visit to her cell one day, ordering her up against the wall by the window. She heard some of them talking about how no prisoners should have been there--that the cell was supposed to be “off-limits”, and that a mix-up at the Watch had occurred…or something like that. Fai was hardly listening to what they were saying. Her attention was focused on the Emperor as he was led into her cell.

She had never thought much about the Emperor as a child--her family’s farm was in a secluded part of Cyrodiil where the influence of bigger cities didn’t reach them. They had heard of him, of course--someone simply called “The Emperor” who her parents would speak of from time to time. They never held any anger in their voices when they referred to him, but neither did they talk about him in a loving matter. He was simply the Emperor, someone who was important in the land, and who commanded the respect of the Imperial Guard. That was all. Her parents seemed more concerned with the potato harvests than they did with what the Emperor did or how it would affect the land. “We don’t know him, and we’ve never met or seen him,” Fai’s mother had once said, “but we trust and follow him, much like we do the Gods.”

That is how Fai then pictured the Emperor--something akin to a God. Or, at least, that was how she saw him when she was a child. When she grew older, she grew to hate the Gods and the fate that they had given her. If her family’s death was “all part of the God’s plan”, as she had once been told, then she wanted nothing to do with them, or their “fate”. She wanted to be in control of her own life--her own destiny. She had vowed that she would never be a puppet for the God’s show. And if she hated the Gods, then she must have hated the Emperor as well.

However, the Emperor Uriel Septim was…different than Fai had pictured him to be. He was old, very old, and looked tired and weary. He wore royal robes of white and red and purple, and a beautiful crimson amulet hung around his neck. However, for a moment, when he stepped into the light of her cell, she saw neither a God nor an Emperor standing before her. She saw a man, a very dejected-looking man, who in a way seemed slightly weak. She had no disrespect for him in any sense, but it was as though he carried a heavy burden on his heart, a burden so great that he would soon break from under it’s weight. His eyes…he looked so very sad. It almost made her feel sorry for him.

Suddenly, when the Emperor looked up, and his eyes caught hers, he stopped where he was as a look of recognition crossed over his features.

“You…” he said quietly, like a revelation. “I’ve seen you.”

Uriel stepped towards her, his Guards watching warily as the captain, Renault, pressed a stone on the wall of the cell, revealing a hidden passage behind the imprisoning rocks and bars. The Emperor’s attention, however, seemed to have been focused only on the skinny, dirty prisoner standing before him.

“Let me see your face,” he said, reaching out and lifting her chin with his hand. “You are the one from my dreams.”

Fai was confused, as any sane person would have been in such a situation. She herself had never seen or met the Emperor before in her life, and yet he claimed to have known her…from a dream, was it? Her, a convicted murderer?

He could see the confusion in her face, and perhaps a bit of fear. When he spoke to her, his voice was soft and gentle, though his words were filled with danger and mystery. He told her of assassins--his three sons were attacked and killed, and he was to be their next victim. His Blades were leading him out of the city along a secret route…one that happened to lead through her cell. He also spoke of the Gods--he seemed to see the workings of Fate mixed in with all that was happening, and he saw that she was somehow involved.

“You are a citizen of Tamriel, and you too shall serve her, in your own way.”

Fai’s shock was beginning to wear off, little by little. Under mention of the Gods, her eyes cooled and her expression clouded. She did not believe in Fate, or the Gods, and had no faith in them. She would not be a part of their “plan”, no matter what Uriel seemed to think.

“I go my own way,” she said to him coolly.

Uriel chuckled, probably sensing her resentment towards the Gods and their ways. “So do we all,” he said patiently, “but what path can be avoided whose end is fixed by the almighty Gods?”

In the time to come, Fai would remember those words, and brood on them deeply. But now, at that moment, she could only scoff at them.

And then, just as quickly as they had arrived, they left. The Blades led the Emperor away from the cell and down the dark, hidden path that had been discovered behind the wall. To her surprise, the Guards did not seem to care if she followed or not. Their minds were filled only with the thoughts of getting their Lord out of harm’s way, not bothering to worry if the prisoner stayed put in her cell or followed them.

So she followed. She knew not where the path would lead, or what would happen, but to her, anywhere was better than that prison. She could handle whatever came next, as long as it got her out of that cell.

Or so she thought.