CHAPTER ONE
The Khajiit was born on the third of Frostfall, in the city of Bruma. A cold place in Cyrodil's north, straddling the border with the nordic province of Skyrim.
Her childhood was of little note. She was born to two caravaneers that travelled from Elswyr. Her parents were not all that unkind to her and it was a good childhood, from what little she could remember of her earliest years.
All good things must come to an end, as they say.
It was a bad fever that took her mother, five days before the Khajiit's seventh birthday. The old cat never got used to the cold winters of Bruma. Her father died the following year.. One day he went into the nearby forest to collect firewood and never returned. Nobody ever found the body.
For a while, the Khajiit waited. For her father and mother to miraculously return from death. Things had moved too fast. Two parents lost within a mere few months. Two deaths in such a short time. She could not believe they were gone.
She kept on not believing for as long as she could. Before the guards threw her out of her parent's shack and onto the cold streets. Eventually she had to face reality and that meant acknowledging that she didn't have any gold, shelter, or food.
And that her mother and father were dead.
Of course, she moved past it. Orphans in Bruma didn't have the time to mourn for long. Soon, the memory of her parents faded. Their deaths no longer stung. She adapted. She survived.
She begged and stole for her food. And on rainy or cold days, she'd hide in one of the delapidated shacks sitting outside the city walls. There were many kindhearted souls who took pity on the poor kitten, with her big golden eyes and mud matted fur. There were many more who scorned her. Those kinds of people were often too busy lecturing to notice their pockets being picked.
The days where her stomach would go empty became normal. She adapted to the life of an urchin; as a warm bed and a roof over her head became nothing more than mere memories from a past life.
Life on her own, while still difficult, became easier. One day she woke up to realise that she could not remember the faces of her parents. It did not trouble her much. There was gold to be earned on that day. Many pockets to pick. Many unlocked doors and open treasuries.
It was supposed to be a normal day. She'd go to her usual spot and perform her usual routine.
"Please, ser. Just one septim or two. Enough to pay for a cleric for my sick mother. She's all I have left!"
It was all a performance. She changed it up sometimes. The bard in her enjoyed making up these stories. The important thing was that the people listening to her had to believe that they were contributing to something. That their money was being used correctly. There had to be some sort of emotional payoff.
Sometimes it'd be for a sick mother. Sometimes for something else. She'd tell them of how much her poor mama had been struggling, yet insist on how strong she still was. She'd tell them that it'd take a hundred septims to pay for a health potion.
Of course, she couldn't ask that much from a stranger. She would ask for ten and say that she already had one hundred and ninety.
That was the trick. To make them think that they are making a difference in the world. To make them believe that their choices mean something. The hardest part was keeping a straight face. Sometimes she just wanted to laugh at them. To think that so many people believed the empty lies of a stranger.
In reality, life was cold and cruel. Her mother had died long ago. And nobody's choices would have saved her. But their coin would put another meal in her belly.
She was a salesman, in a way. She dealt in pity. And she was good at it.
The sun was peeking over the city walls when she arrived at her corner in the market square.
Her 'corner' included an old mat laid against the wall of a place called the 'Windswept Traders'. A general store, she was told. A place where wealthy merchants would gather. Many of those merchants had started off just as poor as she was. And it would not be unreasonable to assume that they would not be completely unsympathetic to her plights, yes?
She sat down with her legs crossed and waited to see what the day would bring.
The city stirred underneath the light of the morning sun. The sight was comparable to a monolithic creature stretching it's arms after a long night's sleep. Hundreds of little rectangular tiled roof buildings built either from heavy stone brick or timber. Thousands of people moving in it's streets, acting as the lifeblood flowing through the many, branching veins of the beast. The city slept and breathed, vibrating with life. And it hungered.
In such a place, anything was possible.
-
She gaver her wooden pan a few worried shakes. She was rewarded with the plinking of gold rubbing against gold.
Not enough. She'd have to go hungry again today. Well. There was no telling that. It might be enough for a few pieces of bread if the food vendors were feeling kind today.
Oh! She had forgotten about the sweetroll she had secreted away in her tunic! Surprise sweetroll, one of the best kinds of sweetroll!
The Khajiit licked her lips, eyeballing the glazed treat. Something like this was to be enjoyed. It wasn't even stale yet.
A hand faster than her own snatched the sweetroll away from her waiting mouth.
She gasped, her eyes widening in confusion.
It was an elf girl, about her age. Flowing blonde hair blanketed her sight. Piercing green eyes glared down at her. The Khajiit was met with a distinctly elvish sneer.
"Well, well, well... And where did you steal this?", asked the elf.
"I did not steal it!", she replied indignantly. It was true as well. She hadn't stolen it. She had found it laying on a table in front of the local bathhouse. The owner of the sweetroll was no where to be found. So the Khajiit had simply pocketed it and walked away. That was not stealing was it? Nobody had stopped her. Nor did anyone come looking for their sweetroll. If they valued it that badly, they would've wanted to reclaim it, no?
The Khajiit rose and lunged for her lunch. The elf deftly sidestepped out of her way at the last moment, causing her to fall flat on her nose.
She heard haughty, elvish laughing rising from behind her. If you ever met an elf, you would understand.
The Khajiit felt rage boil from within. She was used to being bullied. A small, homeless urchin was easy to bully, but it had always been merely common insult or the persecution of drunken racists. Their words were easy to shrug off.
And even in the times where they sought to harm her, she did not mind much. The bruises and cuts were very good for her business. Most often it was mere bruises and cuts. For the rare occasion where it went beyond that... well that was why the Khajiit carried a hunting knife in her boot.
The problem here was simple.
Nobody, not ever in her five years of begging the streets, had touched her food. This was the first time.
She rose like an angry storm cloud, ready to bring divine fury down upon that insolent elf.
"Give it back!", she shouted at... nobody.
The elf was gone. In the distance, among the crowded streets, the Khajiit could hear fading footsteps and girlish giggling.
She gave chase, dodging and weaving around stunned passerbys. Never losing sight of the elf. She vaulted carts full of produce, slid under horses and pushed nobles aside without a nary thought of the consequences. The Khajiit gave chase and she was followed by a great amount cursing.
"Stop!", she yelled in the general direction of the footsteps.
The Khajiit was so focused on catching her mark that she did not notice that she was no longer in the 'nice' part of town anymore. The buildings here were delapidated and ramshackled, with boarded up windows and many sharp turns or alleyways where anyone with heavy pockets could be easily ambushed and relieved of their mortal burdens.
There were less people on the streets here. Squatters and cutpurses peered out from the shadowy recesses of the place.
The Khajiit paid them no mind. She was entirely focused on getting her sweetroll back. It was no longer about the object itself anymore. Now it was personal. Now it was because the elf had made her run halfway around town on an empty stomach. The extensive exercise only served to fuel her anger.
She stopped in the middle of an empty street. She lost her. There was no sight of the blonde elf anywhere.
What's more was that she did not recognize this part of the city. She was lost.
Suddenly, there was a cry. She ran towards it. Normally she wouldn't have, but she was still running on the stale bread from yesterday. She was hungry, tired, angry and afraid. All at the same time.
She simply did not think before running down that dark, miserable alleyway. In the far future, she'd probably look back on this choice and claim that it was the mistake of someone who was so different that she might as well have been a different person.
Maybe she'd wonder what kind of path she'd walk if she hadn't made that wonderful, stupid mistake. You can only wonder with these kinds of things, but it would be safe to say that there probably would have been no fire, the elf would have probably died and things would've turned out very differently.
The cry had came from the blonde haired elf. It was cut short by the big, meaty hand of a local cutpurse named Pork Pork the Orc Orc. He was big, green and ugly. The Khajiit knew him by reputation alone.
"Make another sound and I crack your head against the wall," he grunted to the elf. The brute had a grip on the girl's hair. The same girl that had stolen the Khajiit's sweetroll.
She no longer carried her self-confident sneer. She looked like she was on the verge of tears.
The Khajiit was mid-step when the orc turned his head and called out to her with his eyes wide with rage. "Who's this then? A hero?", the orc scoffed.
She was no hero. When that orc fixed his stare on her, all of the rage and energy that had carried her this far drained right out. She felt nothing but fear and loneliness. What motivated her next actions is impossible to know.
She ran right at the orc. Growing up poor, the Khajiit learned the value of dexerity. She also learned the value of a swift kick placed in all the right places.
The orc reeled and screamed in an awfully unmasculine manner.
"Ah no! You kicked me right in my unmentionables, you cur!", he probably would have shouted if the elf did not set him aflame with a fire spell. Fwoosh.
Instead he said something like, "AAAAAAAAHHHHHH," as his skin peeled off from his face.
He ran right into the open door of a nearby, suspiciously unmarked ramshackle shack.
-
The shack. There are a number of stories that could be written about the shack, and the two persons inside. This is the story about how those two persons are going to die.
One of them was a nord. The other was a high elf. The nord's name was Olgrim and he was currently hefting a large barrel out from a hole in the shack's floorboards. He was being assisted by the high elf, who's name was... Oh forget it. You don't need to know their names anyway. They're about to die in a few paragraphs.
The hole led to a tunnel which eventually led outside the city. The elf and the nord were both smugglers.
"Did you hear something go 'fwoosh' just now," asked the elf.
They were smuggling dwemer oil. It was a good alchemical reagent. Mages paid a great amount of gold for that kind of stuff. Olgrim was not a mage. Olgrim had no clue what they used it for. Olgrim reckoned that those college types liked huffing it.
"Yeah. What do you think that was?", replied the nord.
The oil was being stored in this shack, until they could find a good buyer. They kept the stuff in little, four foot high barrels, secured tightly together with a thick hemp rope.
Olgrim was the one who scouted this place out and came up with the idea of using it as a smuggler's nest. The tunnel was already there when they found this place. There was actually a system of tunnels all underneath the city. It was all very interesting.
"Beats me," shrugged the elf. "Do you think it could be - "
He was cut off just as a flaming orc ran into the shack.
-
There was an explosion. The Khajiit closed her eyes. She heard a sound like a lightning cloud being messily slurped up with a straw and smelled magic being cast.
-
The city was on fire.
They were sitting on a snowy hill, looking down on faraway Bruma. Admist all the white, there was an angry pillar of red blazing through part of the town. The fire was oddly pretty in a way.
Her ears twitched. She could hear screams in the distance.
The elf girl was with her. She sat, hugging her knees, looking with petrified eyes at the distant inferno.
The Khajiit sat down with her, legs crossed. The elf's fine, expensive looking white dress was badly singed. Her hair was notably shorter. She had no eyebrows.
The Khajiit herself was in no better condition. Her tail. Her poor tail. And her fur. The light brown and yellows were hidden under a layer of soot where they should've been caked with her usual mud and filth.
For a while, they simply sat there. Not a word was exchanged. They sat there, listening to the chaos unfolding below.
And then, after what had seemed like forever. The elf offered something to the Khajiit. It was the sweetroll. Burnt. Nearly inedible. But it could not be mistaken for anything else.
"Here," she said with eyes full of tears. She sniffled.
The Khajiit looked at the sweetroll, recognized what it was, and shoved it into her mouth.
Victory. Sweet, sweet victory. It tasted like ash.
The elf was crying now, wiping away the tears with a finger. She managed to somehow look graceful even while silently sobbing.
The Khajiit did not know what to do. She was not used to such open displays of emotion. Should she laugh? No, that seemed inappropriate.
She settled for lightly stroking the elf's back.
Together, they watched the world burn.