This the start of a story i began along time ago and never finished. This isn’t related to the current chapters I am writing.
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I have followed this one since my end. What has it been? A year? Maybe more. It is hard to keep track of these things, especially with the crossing of temporal barriers and all. What a ride to this point. Where shall I begin? Hmmm? I guess we shall start from the beginning. My rebirth.
It was a beautiful night as clear as any I have seen in almost two-hundred years. Bright moon, shining stars, and an army of the dead at my disposal. We, my two sub-commanders, and I were sent from our beloved city to destroy a troublesome outpost to the north of us, known as Trillim. I should have been an easy task had it not been for the reinforcements assigned there from Sprawl City. Cursed mortals. Why can they not leave fate alone? Regardless, my troops and I we numbered to more than two hundred with Death Beetles (nefarious creatures with the ability to project death spores more than a mile away) at our side. The zombies fell quickly to the guns of the out post, as was to be expected. But with the repetitive fire of those cannons of destruction from the shining one, the Death Beetles were torn asunder even before they could deject half of their allotted payloads. Death spores as they are called, an ingenious piece of magic that kills instantly and raises the corpse immediately for my command. The fight was over in a matter of minutes with my entire force decimated along with my sub-commanders. I was last, the last to fall, as it should have been. I now faced the onslaught of those terrible cannons. I was not afraid, for I did not believe they could harm my flesh.
I was up until this point, a nosferatu. A vampire, if you will, a creature of the night with an insatiable hungering for blood. I was no ordinary vampire, for my link to the creature that had given me un-life had been severed by the five who aspire to become one. I was a free soul. I was given the ability to think for myself, to hunt as I please, without the petty boundaries of mock kingdoms to confine me. I was death incarnate. In one solid, infinite second, my life as it were was over. In that instant I was torn to ribbons. Impacted by two groupings of high velocity, magic imbued slugs. As the first group of two hundred impacted with my lower abdomen, I laughed. I watched my torso from the lower ribcage to the middle of my femur disintegrate. In the next instant another group of silver, mach-two hornets impacted with what was left of my upper body. The world spun, as my head flew through the outer edges of the Petrified Forest. At that point I was scared of death again.
The specter, as I call him, stood before me, and looked into my sunken eyes for the second time. He looked long and hard at me as the sun rose on that dreadful morning, I will never forget the first time I gazed upon Death himself, and I am still haunted by the second. As the first rays of sun spiked over his shoulder, upon my brow, I began to turn to dust. Pain, is nothing compared to that sensation. As my torment grew, the shadow of life continued to stare at me. When my corpse was no more I stood, in whole, before the creature that knows only infinite patience. It said to me one thing. In a voice like that of a whisper, barely audible, and uttered through the shadows of time unknown,
“Right your wrongs and eternal rest is your prize. Continue on your course and you shall know that there are worse things than death!”
With the cry of a crow he was gone. Had the specter taken pity on me? If so, why? These things I still contemplate. I am now only a shadow in this world. I am between reality and infinity. I have no body; I am only substance of the negative plane. I am a shadow. I am the Shade, and I start life anew for the third time in as many centuries, how terribly exquisite.
