Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-25828117-20191026122532/@comment-5583506-20191027231302

Every day spent at Ja'zira's strange establishment felt like a year. It was an ever waking nightmare in which "clients" would come and shed their skin, showing their true selves. Kashya had finally come to learn the meaning behind why they were referred to as clients. They were indeed paying customers, and they paid for things that did not make a lot of sense to her, but that she dreaded nonetheless ever since that night.

Malah had convinced the Madame to let Kashya remain off limits for a few days, just to make her recuperate from the event, to which Ja'zira had reluctantly agreed. And during the days that followed Kashya stayed indoors at all time, watching from her window how children played outside in the streets while she was cooped up like a bird in its nest.

It all felt so unfair. Her father had yet to visit her as well, and no news of his wedding had yet to surface. He surely hadn't forgotten?

During the days she was taught by Malah how to dance, and she became quite good at it. The older woman told her that men enjoyed watching women dance, but Kashya personally couldn't find anything particularly interesting in the dance itself. It was fluid, with almost hypnotic, circular motions of both hips and belly, meant to stimulate "arousal", whatever that meant.

"If you become talented enough you might not ever have to experience the same thing again", Malah assured her. "Sometimes, the clients just want to watch a beautiful girl dance, and that will be enough."

Malah had only been half right. While there were some who came to Kashya's private chambers for the sake of watching her dance, there were just as many who came for the same reason that the very first man had come. Malah had also been right about the fact that it would get easier, but not for the better.

Though the pain was still present during the act, it lessened with each time, but never to the point where it left her entirely. Instead, after her client was all satiated, she just lay there staring at the ceiling or the wall with a nauseating feeling in her gut, listening to the ragged breathing of the man lying next to her.

Despite the pain, there were some who were nice to her, talked to her about their lives and asked her about her interests, sometimes even forgetting the reasons why they had come in the first place and so left without as much as even touching her, or at the very least leaving a kiss on her cheek. Some went about their business, but made sure that they didn't hurt her, and even interrupted at times to ask whether she was comfortable or not. Of course she had to resort to lies, even though her father had taught her just how wrong it was to not be sincere with one's opinions. Some clients were well-mannered enough to leave at the door the very moment they realized the age of the girl inhabiting the room. And then there were those who caused her the most pain by giving in to their own desires and frustrations in life. And it was during those moments it hurt the most and she feared for her life. And once they had gone, she would sit in her bed and cry, waiting for Malah to enter and comfort her by holding her and stroking her hair.

Days went, weeks went, maybe even months. And still not a word from her father, or even Kiro. Kashya sat by the window of her chamber and looked out as the sun settled over Senchal, the seagulls crying in the distance.

"Goodnight, Kiro", she sniffed. Despite all the horrible time she had spent here; to the point where the nightly events had become something of a chore for her to do, which she suspected was the very point, she had yet to get fully used to them.

After each physical encounter with a client she felt ill and had a hard time to keep her food down. Malah had commented on how meagre and thin she had become, and insisted that the girl would eat more. For a place with such shady ongoings in every room, there was an abundance of food for both the girls and the clients alike. Mostly fruits and bread, but also various drinks.

Kashya had gotten increasingly fond wine. Especially those labeled Surilie Brothers, imported all the way from Cyrodiil. Her father had strictly forbidden her from drinking wine, but it seemed as if here she was free to drink it to her heart's content. The wine made her head feel light and funny, and Malah had told her that a small amount before an "encounter" with a client would suffice for her to remain blissfully unaware of the event. It would be as if nothing had ever happened.

Madame Ja'zira insisted that she took silphium together with the wine to avoid what she referred to as "little mishaps" left behind by the clients, seeing as Kashya was now at the ripe age. Kashya did not fully understand what the Madame referred to and did as instructed, even though she found that the silphium made the wine taste all the more bitter.

Then there was a knock at the door. Kashya swiftly wiped her tears, adjusted her dress, and made herself presentable.

"Kashya?" Malah asked, softly rapping at the door with her knuckles. "Kashya?"

There was no response.

"Kashya", the young woman said worryingly. "This one is coming in."

It was dark inside the room, yet with her keen Khajiit eyes, it wasn't hard for Malah to spot the girl in the darkness. Kashya was lying face down into a pillow. The dress had been pulled up, exposing her naked behind, and only S'rendarr knew what had been going on this evening.

Malah felt her heart collapse on itself as she hurried up to the bed and rolled Kashya over. The girl's eyes were all blackened from the amount of tears she had shed and the pillow was all wet from her slobbering all over it.

Kashya broke down and huddled close to Malah's chest, desperately clutching onto her as if she feared she would go away.

"This one didn't want to", she bawled. "This one didn't want to."

Malah collected herself and breathed out, embracing the girl and adjusting her dress accordingly while doing so. "Hush, sweet thing", she said. "Hush now. You are safe. Safe with this one. Think of nothing else. He is gone now. He can't hurt you."

"This one hurts every night", Kashya sobbed. "She just wants to go home! Where is father?!"

Malah froze up. She had been told this very evening by Madame Ja'zira of the father's whereabouts, but would she be able to tell Kashya? The girl was already a mess as she was, and no child should suffer in the way that she did.

Malah kissed the girl on her cheek and rocked her back and forth as she would have a baby. "There, there", she spoke softly. "This one is with you, sweet cub."

"Where is father?!" Kashya sobbed, her tears spilling onto Malah's dress.

Malah steadied herself and swallowed hard. "Your father ..." she began. "He is not coming, child."

Kashya looked at Malah with a blank gaze. "Huh?"

"We just received the news that Captain Ka'rin has just married, and will be transferred to Riverhold, the other side of the country."

Kashya just stared at Malah in utter disbelief. "But he wouldn't! He wouldn't leave this one here! He wouldn't!" Her crying began to switch into screaming. "He wouldn't! He wouldn't! He wouldn't!"

Malah tried to calm her down, fully aware of just how ugly this whole situation was. "He is leaving tomorrow, child." She cupped both of Kashya's cheeks in the palms of her hands. "It's ... terrible", she said. "But it's the truth."

It just dawned on Kashya just how she had been lied to. How much she had been made to suffer in the belief that one day maybe her father would come back and liberate her from all this pain. Maybe even that Kiro would find her and take her away from there. She had trusted blindly in childish hopes and pipe dreams, but just now realization hit her like a cold, wet blanket to the face. She knew that her father held nothing but contempt for her, but only now did she understand just how deep that hatred went. He had been fully aware of what place this was, and what was done to her, and yet he had planned to leave her all the same.

He hated her. And only now did she realize that she hated him as well.

She wanted to cry more, but instead just tensed up, unable to get a word or a tear out, and instead just sat there in Malah's lap chipping for air like a fish on dry land.

"Breathe, Kashya, breathe", Malah told her and held her tight. "Breathe. Slowly, that's it."

"This one ... this one can't", Kashya gasped, feeling herself go completely limp in Malah's embrace.

It was all over. Everything. This was what her life would be from now on to the end of her days. Just a plaything. Trapped in a cage, behind bars until use and old age had forced her to accept them as reality.

"This one should have never been born", the girl wheezed.

"Don't say that", Malah comforted her.

Kashya grimaced. "This one wants to die."

This time, Malah tensed up. The girl had said it with such determination that it had frankly scared her. What kind of sick joke had the world become in which a twelve-year-old girl wished for her own demise before life had even begun?

She straightened Kashya up and looked at her. "Run away", she told her.

"Huh?"

"Run away. Go to your father. Confront him and tell him that you can never come back."

Kashya wasn't quite sure how she was supposed to run away. There were sturdy men on the outside who always kept a watch to make sure that no clients made trouble, or that none of the girls left without permission. Kashya had never received a permission, leading her to believe that Ja'zira had been made aware of her father's intentions for quite some time now, without saying anything.

"She can't", Kashya blubbered.

"You can, and you will", Malah insisted. "You will flee. Elope into the night. This one will help you. Run away and don't you ever look back."

"But what about you?" Kashya snivelled. "Won't they blame you?"

"This one is sure they will. Malah will probably get yelled at by the Madame. A lot. But it would have been all worth the effort if it meant that you got away safely. So what do you say?"

Kashya was sure that any moment from now she would wake up to find herself back in the bed, staring at the ceiling or the crack in the wall, with a snoozing client by her side. But Malah's honest ice-blue eyes resonated with her and she gave the young woman a weak nod.

The girl landed with a thud in the shrubbery at the side of the establishment. The sheets had been tightly tied into a makeshift rope hanging out of the window, whilst Malah oversaw everything from above, making sure that the girl landed safely.

Kashya struggled to get up on her feet. Her behind was sore and ached from the encounter with the last client, and her legs were barely able to carry her. If one of the guards posted outside saw her, it would be impossible for her to outrun them.

"Kashya", Malah hissed from the window with a small smile. "Stay safe."

Kashya sniffed, and wiped a tear from her eye. "You too, mommy. Malah", she corrected herself shortly after. "This one won't forget you. She will find you again one day! Promise!"

Malah just smiled back with a small nod, looking around anxiously for witnesses, before she motioned for Kashya to be on her way already as she pulled back the sheets.

Senchal looked completely different by night than during daylight, and Kashya had a hard time orienting her way through the narrow streets and alleyways. She had to push her legs in the direction she wanted to go as every step she took caused her to ache and whimper. It almost looked like she suffered from a limp as she stumbled her way forward in the direction of her house.

Once she started to recognize the area she stopped for a moment. Before her was the district in which Kiro lived, and just further down the street was her own house. She considered knocking on his door. Forget about her father and everything, and instead just be with Kiro. They could escape somewhere together, somewhere far from Senchal, where they could start a new life. Yet she hesitated when she saw just how dark the house was, implying that the whole family was fast asleep. However the lights were still on in her own house.

She couldn't explain why she all of a sudden felt so steady. She didn't cry anymore. And the pain in her posterior seemed to vanish with each step towards that accursed light. Her father had known. He had known about everything from the start. Why would she ever want to go back to him?

For the first time in her life she became scared of herself as she started to imagine some really hideous things going on inside her head. Things she had believed that she wasn't capable of imagining, yet there they were.

And as she approached and her own house came closer and closer, the stronger her emotions became and the more clear the images became, until all of a sudden she stood just outside her front door, feeling on the handle. It was open. Her father never locked the door, she recalled. No burglar would dare to enter the home of Captain Ka'rin and live to tell the tale.

She first stepped into the kitchen. The dining table had yet to be cleared, and it had been set for two on either end. Two wax candles had burned out.

In a daze, she walked through the dwelling until she reached her father's bedroom, letting the door slide open. The room was well lit. Her father was asleep with Tsavirra by his side. The two newlyweds were both completely naked. It was not hard for Kashya to understand what they had done. She had experienced it herself countless of times over, yet watching the two together from the bedside, looking so serene and content with what they had done, made her feel full of wrath and resentment.

How could they look so blissful after a union when she had been unable to feel the same? The past couple of months had been a hell for her, but not to them. It made her feel sick to her stomach.

Tsavirra's belly had become quite big and her breasts had filled out since last she had seen her. It wasn't hard for Kashya to piece two and two together as she finally came to the realization as to from where babies came from.

"Kashya?" her father all of a sudden asked, and she realized that she had been staring herself blind upon the two, completely missing that her father had woken up. "How did you get here?" He stared her down from where he was lying, his gaze fixed on her right hand. "Kashya, put down the knife."

"Huh?"

Kashya looked down at her right hand, only now becoming aware that she held a sharp butcher's knife there. When had she gotten it? Maybe it had always been there? Maybe from she walked through the kitchen, but if so, how came she didn't remember any of it?

"Kashya, put down the knife", her father repeated with concern in his voice.

"What's going on, dear?" Tsavirra asked, as she was suddenly made aware of Kashya's presence and gave out a startled yelp before hastily covering herself up with a blanket. "Kashya, dearest. D-do as your father tells you."

"You left this one", Kashya said steadily, raising the knife and watching as Ka'rin slightly flinched. Her fear of confronting her father was almost gone at this point. "You left this one at a whorehouse." She had months of experience to know what that word entailed now thanks to frequent visits of an Argonian client. "You left this one to be used and abused, and you knew exactly what was being done to this one."

"Enough", her father said. "Put down the knife, or I will make you wish you never came here."

Kashya let out a short laugh. "You will make this one wish she never came here?" she mocked. "After everything this one has endured for your treachery, she wishes that she was dead. Can you top that, father? Can you make this one wish she was anything more than that?"

Her father wrinkled his brow, clearly taken by surprise at Kashya's sudden change in tone and demeanor, and for the first time in his eyes she saw an emotion she had more experience of than him, but recognized all the same: fear.

"Kashya, put aside the knife", Tsavirra said anxiously. "D-did you know, dear. About the ..."

Ka'rin shook his head. "This one didn't know."

"You lie", Kashya hissed. "The things they did to Kashya's body. She can still feel it, looking at you and talking to you. By S'rendarr, she can still feel the pain. And you knew it all."

Her father shook his head again. "Ka'rin didn't know", he insisted. "This one thought that you would only scrub ..."

"Scrub the floors, prepare the food, clean the rooms. That was indeed the deal. Yet it never once occurred to you that they would want more of Kashya. Or maybe you just did not care?"

"You do not want to hurt me", Ka'rin told her.

Yes, you do.

She could barely contain it within her any longer. Any excuse her father tried to make, just made her feel every thrust inside her all over again. It resonated with each time she let the knife fall upon him, stabbing him in the face over and over and over, all the while as Tsavirra screamed by his side and the blood kept pumping. If she had been any other lowlife, like a burglar or a street thief, the disciplined Captain Ka'rin would have dealt with them in an instant without hesitation. But this assailant was his own daughter. His meek and frightened daughter who never once disobeyed her father out of fear of punishment. To even imagine the chances of her attacking him with a knife in a fit of rage and contempt was an impossibility, and thus rendered him completely impotent to ward himself from her attacks. The stabs came over and over again, like a murder of crows swooping down upon their hapless victim. He desperately tried to protect his own face, but eventually lost his vision from his own blood pooling up in his sockets. She finished him off with a slow, but precise cut through his windpipe until she hit bone. A wet triangular wall of blood sprayed in her face and all over the bedsheets.

Somewhere in this cacophony of screams, cuts, and blood, even Tsavirra had gone silent and now lay dead next to her newlywed husband, with Kashya's unborn sibling still inside her.

The girl backed off. The blood felt warm on her fur at first, but as soon as the night kept crawling in it made her feel quite cold. Blood pooled down from the bed and began to seep out onto the floorboards. Kashya backed away and sat herself down in a corner, dropping the knife to the floor. She huddled together and hugged her legs in an effort to keep them steady. The pain inside her had nearly subsided, but she still found it quite hard to sit down properly.

There was nothing to do now, but to wait, she reckoned. Wait for the Senchal Lions to find their former captain murdered and then send his daughter off to the headsman's block. She had seen the procedures and figured it would all be over within an instant. As soon as dawn broke they would be there and all her pain would be gone.

Bad blood.

Quite a fitting end to her, she thought. She was never meant to be born after all. She was simply returning a corpse to its grave.

"My, my, this is just a miserable mess", a voice said all of a sudden.

Kashya looked up, her face completely void of any expression and her mind as blank as a piece of paper. In front of her stood a man, a Breton, she reckoned. He was completely draped in black. He observed the bloody massacre in the bedroom with some fascination and then looked at her.

"Did you do all this?" he asked her.

"This one did not mean to", she murmured. "She did not want to, but he wouldn't stop lying to her. And then she could not stop herself." She hung with her head against the wall. "This one did not sleep", she said weakly. "She did not want to lie down and dirty herself more with his blood."

She glanced over at Tsavirra, feeling some remorse. She was indeed bad blood, just like her father had said. Tsavirra had done her no harm, and now she had also killed an unknown sibling of hers. She was a kinslayer of the worst kind and as such only deserved the worst.

The man smiled at her warmly. "My name is Celtian", he told her. "What is your name?"

"Kashya", she said. "This one is Kashya."

"I am pleased to have made your acquaintance, Kashya. I am Celtian, Speaker for the Dark Brotherhood."

Kashya had only heard of the Dark Brotherhood in bypassing conversations between her father and his men.

"Since it seems that you may have ... distanced yourself from those next-of-kin on the bed, I would be more than happy to present to you a new, loving family. One that will never hurt you or lie to you. One that will always embrace you and accept you for who you are. So how would you feel about going to meet them?"

Kashya looked around for a moment, reflecting over what she had just done. She thought about Kiro, about Baijan, about Malah. They were all people she cared for deeply, yet if they knew what she had done, would they wash their hands off her? She cared too much about Kiro to allow that to happen. If he learned that Kashya was a ruthless killer he would just scorn her as well. Baijan would probably die of a heart attack the moment she heard about all the things Kashya had experienced. And Malah would lament the fact that she aided her in her escape just so that she could murder her father.

There really wasn't much time needed to reflect upon the matter. She simply couldn't go back to a life before all of this.

She looked up at Celtian with a cold determination in her gaze and gave him a firm nod.