BE BRUTALLY HONEST. Is this a good start?

It's excellent! The only parts i would change are the places where you repeated words in the sentence after wards, like when you said she ran towards the opening of the cool, damp cave you used opening again, and when you wrote 'quietly agreeing to let Kohana go on the hunt' you used hunt again in the nextsentencee. You could have used 'it' instead of 'the hunt'.