Shades of Red Options

[ShogunSniper]

this is my first attempt at a fan fiction. i wrote this in school while i was bored, and spoofed it up for my submission here. im not sure if i will continue it, and this isn't really a complete entry. it feels quite like an unfinished intro but just deal with it.



I wait in darkness. Tme flows through me like a river without substance. Hours pass. Minutes. Seconds. All meaningless to me. Most would say my career, my reason for shrouding myself in shadow, is to kill. Though, the wise understand my job is to disregard any number of things. I disregard my fear of darkness. I forget my guilt. I turn my head to moral reasoning. I shrug off questions, comments, compliments, insults. I ignore the passing days, and they ignore me.

When time moves without you, no natural end to your life can be seen. This is the case with me. I don't bother myself with the concern of dying of old age or passing away in my sleep, less it be by poison. A cold, dark blade through my chest, or an arrow lodged in my throat are things I must keep an eye on in nature's stead. These are the instruments through which death will reach me. And since such forms of mortal awareness are all inflicted by men, it is only logical that if I need not fear age, then all that is left to cower from is the wraith of man.

With only human ambition to be done in by, I have concluded my life and my purpose to one simple truth: Serve those more powerful than myself.

If you hold swords against a man who you cannot kill, you will not kill him. This is my logic, yet scores of aspiring heroins do not grasp this idea, and ultimately die by my steel. No matter how you look at it, see me as a killer or a disregarder, I serve the powerful. The powerful need jobs done. They pay the Black Hand. The Black Hand pays me.

I am an assassin of the Dark Brotherhood.

I make my living off of disregarding, forgetting, head turning, shrugging, and ignoring. End's meet is made by killing. I kill people like yourself. I kill the intelligent. The stupid. The big. Small. Strong. Weak. Brave. Cowardly. Among all the diversities of Nirn, I sow a common trait. They all die silently in the darkness.

~~~

They call me Sadril. I was birthed in the Nordic town of Bruma. My skin is ashen, my hair silver. I am a bastarde. One would assume, however, that since my mother is of the racial majority of my hometown, that my father would have to be Dunmeri. In fact he was.

Long lost bedtime stories tell me that I share my father's name. They tell me of his cunning and wits and of his cursed blood, which he also blesses me with. Though a father who abandons his own kin and crimson is not worthy of the few thoughts I keep on the tip of my mind, and so he remains among the things that I am paid to forget daily...

[ShogunSniper]

The remainder of dusk was lost to silence.

I sat against a nearby tree, lost in my own maze of thought while Elle had apparently gathered wood for a fire. She brought me out of my trance, and I watched her build the pieces into a neatly stacked pyramid and ignite it with a peculiar spell. A fiery snake slithered from her hands cupped together just inches from the kindling. It twisted and twirled casting lashes of fire upon the wood until it completely comnsumed it.

She stared intently at the fire with emotionless eyes, and I stared at her. I was unable to tear myself away, watching as she clearly pondered on a pressing issue; admiring how strikingly the flame pronounced her features. The darkening ambience of light contrasted with the glow of the flame on her grey-blue skin, as if the two fought for control over such a high stake; light and darkenss... She must have felt my gaze baring down upon her, or simply seen me out of the corner of her eye, for she turned her head towards me and shot me a smile warmer than the fire she brought to life.

It was the last thing I remembered before dozing off for the night. The image of her stayed with me through my slumber, as it was more than welcome to.

~~

I slowly and wearily opened my eyes. Oddly, I saw the same blinding light that I had witnessed when I was first awaken from death by the heavenly water days ago. I felt a sudden pain in my chest, several points of pain in fact. Sudden, but at the same time they felt as if they were always there, I had only forgetten about them. Pulsing, throbbing pains that dug deep; and another, in the back of my right leg. I was no longer on a blanket, instead I felt as if lied in ice soaking through my back. Dew.

No.... A realization began to dawn on me. A realization so sickening, I began to feel nauseous.

It can't be...

Before I could clearly voice the conclusion in my own head, I heard a familiar, distant crunching of leaves. It grew louder, the sound moving closer. Not just familiar. I had heard it once before.

This is not happening.

My heart sank. I felt betrayed by my own imagination. Such a cruel trick it played on me, giving me such glorified bliss then severing my tie to it.

This can't be. Wake up, Sadril! Wake up next to Elle, you fool!

I recognized it clearly now, without any doubt in my mind. The very same steps taken towards me in what I thought were my final breaths approached once more. I closed my eyes, blotching out the sun with the blackness of my eyelids, but the crunching of leaves did not cease. I could see their feet. Dark, shapeless limbs shattering the brittle structures of each browning leaf they trampled under foot.

Step. Crunch...

Why?

Step. Crunch...

How?!

The sound grew until it became a distorted mass of noise. Not a scream like last time. No. Instead the distortion was caused by more pairs of feet joining the original, making each suspenseful footstep blur with the rest into a single horrifying roar. They came from all directions, their focus on me. The blazing cacophony crushed my spirit. My hope. My happiness drained away, as I'm sure the color from my Dunmeri face did as well.

Finally, they stopped at my sides, above my head, below my feet, and I once more tried opening my eyes. People... Monsters garbed in black with bows strung over their shoulders and emptied quivers across their backs surrounded me. The only one who dared show his face to me was an Imperial man. A man with greying black hair reaching out in all directions, trying to get away from his terrifying features. Namely, his eyes, as silver and distant as the high moon. He smiled a crooked smile, so icy cold it froze the blood in my veins. He smiled at the hopelessness of his quarry, of me, as he brought a black leather boot down on top of an arrow embedded in my chest.

I heard screaming. It was not Ardarume's, but my own. The man's foot leisurely forced one of the arrows deeper into my chest cavity. I felt it tearing through any matter of tissue inside me. My breathing grew shallower as the bottom of the Imperial's foot inched closer to my body. The arrow pressed against the interior of my shoulder blade and scraped wretchedly across it. I did not only feel it, but I heard the arrowhead grinding away at my bone like a Khajit's claw across slate.

I screamed louder but found I could not move.

Tha man. The demon. The monster. The god of all my suffering put more of his weight on his leg until the arrow, with no more tissue to shred and no cartilage weak enough to penetrate, snapped inside of me. I felt my lungs become littered with splinters as he did this to both of the arrows in my chest. The projectiles were not made of any humane steel or iron, but rather of ancient wood, grown black as night and just as vengeful in its age.

My screams began to grow muffled by the blood flowing into my mouth. The darkness encroached inward on my vision as I had grown accustomed to. I did not resist its pull this time, but rather embraced it. Each gasp brought sizzling embers into my body, and each sigh expelled blood with the redness boiled out of it leaving only a black resin on my lips. Death would save me from the pain that much quicker...

The brutish, militiristic Sadril that resided in my head with the others would not go so quietly with this decision of mine. "Are you going to give into unconciousness again?" He asked condescendingly. "Poor poor Sadril," he mocked, adding an aching head to my extending list of pain, "Everytime you get hit with some silly little arrow you go down for the count!" He yelled. The others, the teenage girl-crazed Sadril, the cold calculating Sadril, the wise riddle spinning Sadril, they all remained silent, ashamed of the fault they shared.

Silence passed for a moment, then I felt like I was sinking. The hair-thin thread I suddenly clung to, suspending me above the murky colorless pool of death, began to slip between my fingers. I looked down and saw myself in the reflection of the darkness, a paralyzingly fearful expression plastered across my face. Above me, atop the cliff from which I dangled, stood the merciful Sadril of strength and honor.

"You're weak!" He screamed, louder than that of the previous painfully honest Sadril.

"No I'm not!" I yelled back, slipping ever closer towards the void.

"You're a damnable coward!" Sadril shouted, "You run from pain and suffering until you can run no longer run, then you just give up and die!"

"I do not!" I exclaimed futilely as I dropped closer still to being consumed.

"Instead of standing up to the people who may be stronger than you, you simply do their bidding. You're no better than a dog, taking orders and fetching papers! Taking the lives of innocents!"

"No..." I replied, in a less confident, weaker voice.

I held the string supporting me by only my thumb and forefinger, with mere inches of slack left to slip down, my next loss of ground would surely be my last.

"You gutless scum, you couldn't even protect your own sister!"

"DIE!" I cried.

I clenched my fist, grasping the final length left on my lifeline, and opened my eyes wide. An uncontrollable anger bubbled over inside my head as I regained my awareness and finally picked the moon-gazed man out from a line up of those I feared from my forgotten memories.

My grip, in reality, did not clutch thread of any sort. In its stead was the man's leg, draped in black cloth, resting triumphantly on my chest that was in my grasp. Blood drenched my fingers and dripped down his leg from where my nails had punctured him as I gave him a primal, murderous look.

His smile widened and his eyes revealed the joy my anger gave him.

My fist tightened until at least half of the length of my fingers disappeared into his flesh. Growing tired of being stepped on, I rolled to my left, not loosening my grip. He fell over, as any normal person would, though his daunting smile remained immortal. It begged me to take his life.

I obliged.

I released his leg, lept upon and straddled him, my knees pinning his arms down. I wrapped both my hands around his throat and slowly tightened them. He will die the slow death he tried to impose on me.

My burning lungs, my bleeding chest, they all no longer mattered to me. I was blind with rage and wanted only to see the death of the moon-gazed man. I wanted that terrible smirk to disappear from his features. My inferno of hatred fueled further by that thought, I squeezed harder but his smile only widened. Frustrated, I brought my right leg back and began kneeing him in the stomach with all the strength I could muster. I felt pockets of air being forced out from under my grip with each blow after gruesome blow to his gut. A slight hum began to irritate the air, as if my anger reverberated and shook Nirn.

Though through all this brutality that would have killed a lesser man, he opened his mouth, and appeared to laugh, though what escaped his lips was no hideous howl. Instead, straining to hear past the buzz of fury that began to swarm about the entire scene, I could make out the sound of him struggling for air. I could have smiled and listened to the sound of his glorious suffering for hours. I leaned in closer to hear past the incessant static that I could neither explain nor acknowledge, and smiled a terrible destructive grin.

His anguish made me feel so much more powerful, but with the power came the droning noise that drowned out the painful sound I was growing to enjoy. I moved my ear closer still to his laughing mouth, only to discover what was horribly wrong.

I could almost pick out the voice behind the man's battle for air. This struck me as odd, for as close as an encounter I had had with the moon-gazed being in the past, I never heard his voice. I listened harder, trying to hear past the persistant monotonous tone around me. This time I was listening not for pleasure, but for knowledge. I had to know whose voice the struggling belonged to. Though, even as my ear was less than an inch from his mouth, it never crossed my mind to loosen my grip on his throat.

That is, until I recalled the name that belonged to the echo of the voice behind his fight for air.


Elle

~~

T'is a frightful feeling when a man comprehends that there is an off chance that he is unknowingly strangling the woman whom he thinks he is in love with, even if that woman was from a dream. It is so frightful, that it scared me into loosening my grip ever-so-slightly on the man who I hated with so much passion. I heard Elle again. Rather than struggling for breath though, she managed to gain a taste of the fresh air from under my barely eased clasp. However slight, the sound of her gasp brought the coming of two things:

The first being the buzzing that felt ready to obliterate me dissipitated with my anger; which was replaced by a vivid fear of what I may have done; of who I may have actually been strangling.

The second being that my location on the edge of the treeline where I was thought to had been slain was sucked out from under and around me. The entire world was pulled down the moon-gazed man's throat like a fabric painting being pulled through a hole in the wall behind it. I was left with only darkness through which the sound of Elle's gasp resounded brilliantly, and a now meaningless person under me.

However, with the vanishing of the world came the morphing of the man I had originally intended to choke. The arms that my knees held down and the throat that my grip still clung tightly to no longer belonged to the moon-gazed man. Instead, pinned helplessly beneath me, pulling hard for air, eyes tearing up, was the girl of my dreams.

My surroundings, whether they were dreamt or real, faded back in from blackness. The green blanket I once rested on, the smoldering fire, everything was how it was before the last time I slept. With the exception of the fact that I was half strangling Elle, rather than verbally sparring with her.

Everything I thought I knew about reality shattered at that moment. I was unsure whether I was dreaming or awake or awake and simply hallucinating. Realizing that I was now in control of myself and was still choking Elle, I quickly withdrew my hands from her and scrambled to get off of her.

Even as I did, I still forced myself to get further away, wrinkling the blanket as I clumsily stood and backed away from her. I tripped over my own feet and fell backwards, hitting my head against the trunk of a tree. My vision blurred and I thought I might black out again before the words of the militiristic Sadril rang through my head.

I regained myself and looked down at my hands, asking myself if I had actually done what I thought I did. They trembled violently when I was struck by yet another image which I preferred to have not been.

My right hand was stained with blood, as it was during my struggle with the moon-gazed man. This blood was Dunmeri, though, not Imperial. My focus shifted from my hands, to the shaken girl who sat against a tree across from me. Her left arm poured blood from several deep claw marks in it... Caused by me.

She clutched it with her other arm, and with both she put pressure on her stomach. I... Must have kneed her as well...

And of course, the ashen skin of throat was darkened with irritation, caused by my stranglehold on her. She must have seen me looking her over as she started to explain in a shaken, hoarse, yet unbelievably fearless voice, "I.. I was checking y-your wounds while you slept...

"You were peaceful until..." she trailed off, losing confidence for a moment. "Until I tried to repl--" She swallowed hard. I could tell that it was painful to do so from what damage I must have caused to her trachea. "Replace your bandages. I put pressure on it to hold the cloth in place while I wrapped it."

The pressure on my chest. That man's boot pressing down...

She swallowed again, having to supress a cough this time. "When you..." once more she trailed off.

I must have grabbed her arm as I did that man's leg.

She leaned forward and crawled across the outstretched blanket toward me, blood dripping from her fingertips onto the green fabric. The thought that I had inflicted such a wound to her made me cringe and feel sick to my stomach. "I know it wasn't you, Sad--"

"Don't come any closer!" I shouted, pulling my hands and legs in close to me, afraid that they might again commit a heinous act without me knowing. She replied only with her saddened ruby eyes, denied of their sole want to be close to me. It seemed I was more panicked than she was.

Elle stopped aproaching and, with a grave expression, sat not six feet from me. She looked at me with pity and concern. "Sadril..." she finished quietly. Even with her voice torn by trauma, it still maintained some of its serene beauty...

This post has been edited by ShogunSniper: Mar 11 2007, 06:40 AM