I really don't know how to categorise this story – drama, mystery, suspense, and, potentially, tragedy. I've drawn up plans for where i want to take this story, but – well, i suppose it's liable to change!! Reviews are appreciated, and i urge you to be as critical as possible – please, let me know what needs improving, whether you like the characters and storyline etc etc. I'll try to be as attentive to criticism as possible.
Incidentally, i won't be slavishly following the Dark Brotherhood questline format. I feel that could get really dull, considering that we've all played it, and we all know how it goes - so, if i appear to be taking rather a lot of "artistic license" with the story/characters, it's intentional.
Other than that, i hope you enjoy the story, and, again, i really appreciate your opinions – i'm here to improve my writing – and i'll try to act upon criticism as best i can. Thank you very much!!
Prologue
That night, Stas returned, and the house was empty. She stood on the threshold, peering through the door that had been kicked through and thus shattered, surveying with mounting horror the spectacle that lay before her. The small Bravilian hovel had been so thrown about, it vaguely resembled the Arena Bloodworks: chairs had been upturned, as had the tables, upon which had been bottles of that cheap, bland wine - and these too had been cast about, now leaving puddles of heady-smelling, gory-looking liquid amidst pointed shards of glass. A recently-burnt stump of a candle lay extinguished in the spilt wine. Her mother's skooma bottles lay strewn about the floor, leaking their potent contents. Drawers had been pulled out and the clothes that lay therein were scattered about the place. Bed sheets and curtains that had been ripped from their rails sat steeped in the pools of wine and skooma, as if the perpetrator of the damage had, in a fleeting moment of good-conscience, attempted to soak up the ghastly liquids that drenched the floor, staining the vaguely greenish, damp and rotted floorboards an unnerving shade of red.
The scene was too chaotic, too decimated to be that of a theft. The atmosphere was thus that it seemed, not just the atmosphere of a place invaded, but that of an environment ravished. An eerie sense of dreadful quiet hung over the house now, like the calm after a storm. Not even an hour hence, Stas had been sent by her mother to the local inn, to barter for some bread for dinner. And now, loaf under her arm, she returned to find the house devastated, but empty: her mother was gone.
The situation was singularly odd for many reasons. Stas's mother was a hopeless alcoholic, terribly ill both physically and mentally. She did not work, and very seldom left the house. Also, the state in which Stas now found the house suggested a violent struggle.
Stas's breath grew short as she inspected the tumultuous rubble. She looked for notes, an indication, anything. The curtains were slashed. The bedroom door had broken in and now lay in splinters on the floor. Oddly, however, no clothes were missing, nor shoes. Even her mother's hopelessly light purse lay undisturbed. With every new detail discovered, the icy, trembling feel in her stomach grew in strength, while her own physical strength diminished and her hands shook with fright. The closer she examined the scene, the more it looked like the site of a violent attack, rather than the site of a theft or a place from where someone had hastily fled. Stas bent down to inspect the dark, inky pools on the floor – black in the dim of the poorly situated house. It was wine, surely? The spilt wine. But it was too thick for wine. Wine did not congeal, did it? She held a timorous finger to the wretched puddle. The liquid was oddly silky. She bent closer. It did not smell like wine, either.
One thing was missing, she noticed. It took her a few moments to realise, but, upon inspection, Stas found that her mother's dagger was missing. The loose floorboard under which it was usually kept hidden was rent from its place and left discarded across the other side of the room. Her fear grew steadily stronger at this revelation – this dagger, missing. The terror, like a burden upon her shoulders, had her bent and cowering like a dog in fear of violent abuse. She was unarmed, and the dagger was missing. The creeping shadow of evening made every silhouette a hooded killer. Her young mind made vast leaps, soaring to inevitable conclusions, twists of fate and spectres of dark memories abounding in her mind. Why did this feel so familiar? She felt helpless, utterly – but why did she sense that this was not the first time she had felt thus? Her mother was gone, and fear overwhelmed her. She had no friends to whom she could run, and her mother, in the appalling state that she was, did not keep up contacts or relations – indeed, as far as Stas knew, she had none. She felt her mind tilt towards a black inevitability. Of options and choices she had very few.
She would have run to the guardsmen – but she knew that she could not. From her earliest memories, Stas recalled the few words her ailing alcoholic mother deemed to share. She made Stas swear to secrecy, to resist making friends, and to avoid involving the law and authority in their affairs. They lived covertly, impoverished and secretive. Stas pulled her hair and pressed her eyes, recalling the words that her mother had always recited to her – so often, that the words seemed the very mantra of her childhood. It was a dark fear, that of the unknown. And her mother's words had been so guarded, so very ambiguous. But Stas was compelled by circumstance, fearing that whatever had happened to her mother in this place would happen to her as well. She grabbed the thin purse, nearly empty though it was, and, pausing only to pick up some extra clothes and the previously-purchased loaf of bread, fled the house. It was no home to her, anyway. She did not rue running away. Fear prevailed, as the only emotion possessing her at that precise moment was the desire to get as far away from Bravil as possible.