Where I left off:
MildlyFrightenedBoy Image
Julia Image
Biography/Background: I come from an unnamed, resolute island in the ocean. The island only had six inhabitants: my mother, my father, a close friend of my parents, my older brother Alex, my younger sister Julia, and myself. The nearest land is the coast of a much larger island known as Ourania. Since the age of five, I practiced the art of assassination there under my father, who was a skilled weapon smith, and my mother, a graceful assassin herself. My brother trained crafting weapons out of metals that washed ashore, and his sister was an assassin like I was. In my youth, I trained day and night, practicing sneaking up on large beasts that roamed the island and killing them for food, along with crafting makeshift weapons from loose sticks and twigs with my sister. I could never practice my trade until the time was right, my father always told me. I felt that my skills were being restricted from me on the tiny island in the middle of nowhere. At the age of fifteen, I grew restless with constantly honing my tremendous skills for nothing and decided to leave the nest. I wouldn't just disappear overnight; I would go out with a blaze.
When the sun went down and everyone went to sleep, I put my skills to work. I left no survivors except my sister, a skilled cartographer, who I decided would be a key component of my plans. Julia complained that, had I not killed them before telling her, she could have helped. We felt like captives stranded on that island. Our brother was the shining glory in our parents' eyes, even though he was too nonathletic to sneak up on a boulder, much less another person, so he stayed in the makeshift forge with our father. The two of us used an old bed as a raft to swim to the shore of Ourania, where we found a man that they could purchase a helicopter from.
We killed him and stole the helicopter, flying to Tarrania to find work. It seemed that the easiest place for two mercenaries to get simple work would be in the winning side of a war.
When we arrived at the first port in Tarrania, we found ourselves in an absolute slum. We were immediately approached by two thugs demanding money who held us at gunpoint. I shrugged and gestured toward my sister, who pulled two small darts from her back pocket and threw them with incomparable speed, piercing through the eyes of the two criminals, killing them on the spot. When they hit the ground, she stepped forward and retrieved her weapons of choice from the corpses, cleaning off the blood on one of their shirts.
"I don't think we are just going to get an application handed to us that easily," I said to my sister. "We might have to keep looking for a better client."
"And a more difficult target," my sister replied with a grin.
Continuation:
I found a small journal lying on the filthy streets of Tarrania. I decided that I wanted to write a legacy of our adventure from the small, forsaken island where we were born, raised, and trained as assassins to our grand conquest in the war. I stole a package of pens from the nearby store and began to write.
"Julia and I have been roaming the slums near the coast of Tarrania for about three days now. We have found no work so far, but I have begun to steal from stores and their customers in order to obtain food and supplies for the two of us. We have found an abandoned home that we have taken over. To be honest, though, it wasn't completely abandoned before we got there. The bodies of the three drug dealers are currently buried in the small garden behind the house. Julia says that they will make the perfect fertilizer and she can soon begin to grow plants to use to make a wide variety of poisons. Apparently, she isn't yet deadly enough. Whatever.
Anyway, I will soon have us both enlisted in the Tarranian army as soon as I can coerce someone to forge two passports saying that we came from Ourania (not via stolen helicopter). Things might just start turning for the better."
I put my journal into the pocket of the coat that I had taken with me from my island. I had made it with my brother a very long time ago, and it still held sentimental value to me.
A lady shrouded in a black robe stopped midway down he street. I stood between two run-down buildings near the curb. Still in the middle of the street, without turning to look at me, she asked, "What do you got there, might I ask?"
I scowled. "Don't try stealing from me. I'm more tough than you might think."
"Oh, is that so?" she asked, smiling and still looking down the street.
Suddenly, two hands shot out from behind me. I grabbed the wrist of the first man and broke it in one clean motion as he crumbled to the floor. I took the knife from my pocket and stabbed at the face of the second man. With lightning-fast speed, he darted out of the way as I swung the small blade back into the side of his head. The woman had taken this time to run up behind me and attempt to stab me in the back. I grabbed her hand, which still clutched the knife, and swung her onto the two corpses, letting her knife finish her off. I looked around to see if there were any more of the strange cloaked figures nearby and saw none, so I started to walk back to our new home.
I heard a voice from behind me.
"Impressive." It was the woman. She should have had a knife through her chest.
She stood up and held out her weapon of choice. It was a metal knife with a dulled blade that could retract into itself in so that no one could be harmed.
"Interesting," I said. "The two men, though, they aren't okay, are-"
"They are disposable. That is not the urgent matter. What matters is that I have been sent here by the Shadows of Araceli, an elite, undercover group of assassins working to destroy the draconian and barbaric Tarranian army. I must take you to the Den of Shadows, the headquarters of the Shadows of Araceli."
I was not completely fine with the fact that, not only there were people ordering me around, but there were people that even knew that I existed. That didn't matter much, seeing as I was not in a position to turn down work of any kind.
"Under one condition," I said.
"No special accommodations will be made for-"
I grabbed the knife out of my pocket, darted under her arm, and held it up against her throat.
"My sister will come too, or you will die."
"Ah, your sister Julia. She is in the plane. Look up."
I glanced up, looking for a plane, to see a small fighter pilot perched on top of a nearby building. From the window, my sister was waving happily. She rushed to the door and shouted, "Please take your knife off of the throat of the Queen of Shadows. She is very nice once you get to know her!"
I grumbled an apology, put my knife back into my coat, and headed for the plane.
Queen of Shadows Image
