The Undead - Prologue

Prologue of a novel i plan to write "The Undead". Since it's only the prologue i can't tell you much about the story, only that the prologue is set about twenty years after the beginning of the story.

BOOK I
THE UNDEAD

Prologue

I don't breathe, I don't feel.

The grass under my feet wilts, The air around me turns to poison, Everything I touch crumbles to dust.

Everyone around me dies, Yet I am unable to.

I am the darkness, that swallows life.

Endless and Empty.

I am the Devil.

I am death.

The Wraith moved slowly, gracefully, into the city of living man who had spent most of their lives hunting and killing her people, she saw the hate, anger and fear in the eyes of those who still remained here in spite of the impending danger.

She could understand why they hated her, she still had faint memories of what it meant to be alive. How everything was so sweet, warm, intense and satisfying. She didn't like to think about what she had lost forever, such thoughts implant themselves inside ones consciousness and leech on the motivation to improve ones situation. That in itself had been a hard lesson to learn.

The people here were mostly men, volunteers willingly sacrificing their lives to give their families a chance to survive. They were brave, desperate and stupid, they have not realized what she had tried to accomplish these last few weeks, she had given them every chance to escape but they had stubbornly remained behind their wall's.

Suddenly arrows where flying in her direction from everywhere. They should have known that it was useless against the dead, it was true that she didn't look like most undead but arrow's were still as ineffective against her as they were to the Gilgamesh, The fierce giant warrior's of the undead.

The projectiles pierced her skin, penetrated her chest and lungs, but she didn't feel them, they were only pricking her shell, slightly. They didn't even use fire against her.

The Wraith concentrated and turned her body, letting her essence swallow it up, practically turning her body into a Spirit. The arrows that came at her still passed through without causing harm and the ones that had fixed themselves in her limbs fell to the ground. The living cried out in surprise, she was a new type of undead, a completely new link in the chain.

She now stood in front of the castle complex gates and stepped through them. She felt the cold as she passed through the solid metal, but no other resistance even appeared to stop her.

Inside they came at her with swords, Axe's, fire. Nothing could harm her, not in the slightest. She paused to orientate herself, she had to find him to stop this or she would have to kill a lot of people, she wasn't opposed to killing, she had lost her feelings slowly over the time after she had died, but she tried to avoid it if possible.

She shouted in a unearthly way that echoed through the morning air like sharp needles “RAPHAEL!” the men attacking her backed away holding their ears, two of them had collapsed, unconscious or dead. She waited a moment before she shouted again “RAPHAEL! If you will not talk to me I am going to kill every men in this city! And it will be your fault”

She waited a moment and was just about to shout once more when a calm voice to her left answered “my fault, Wraith? I am not the wretched being, slaughtering my people”

Like always when she spoke to him she felt a pang of... of... she didn't really know, it was hard to describe such a small sting of feeling's long forgotten.

Was it grief? Loss? Betrayal? Was it anger? Or was it longing? She would have liked to know.
“no you don't slaughter people Raphael, you just keep them here to be slaughtered even thought I left you every opportunity to retreat, don't condemn me for this, you chose to be here yourself, Raphael” She looked at the men uneasily watching their commander and the unholy creature talk “I ask myself if you gave them the choice or if they remain here to be killed only on your order”

Raphael's calm face turned crimson “I do not need to deceive my men so that they will follow me, they have their own reasons for being here, not like your mindless swarm of festering ghouls!”

“I have not come here to exchange insults with you, Raphael. I don't even care if you listen to me or not, I just wanted to give you one last opportunity to hear me out, If you choose not to then I will crush you here and now, you have seen my troops Raphael, you know I speak the truth”

Raphael looked at her with a mixture of sorrow and hate, the only way he had looked at her since the spare occasions they had met since she had died.

He sounded tired when he asked her “what do you want from me then, love? That we surrender? That is not going to happen.”

“I know you would never surrender Raphael, I know you to well for that. No, I wanted to propose to you a suggestion”

“and what would that be? What could you have to offer your enemy?”

“you leave the castle and the area up to the River “Serene” and I promise you won't be pursued and there will be no more attempts to take more of your disadvantaged king's lands”

“how am I supposed to believe anything you say, you have no honor and no conscience to keep a promise”

“you think I lost my honor because I died? You think I lost myself and that I don't know what I am doing? No Raphael, my word holds true. As true as it once did when I spoke to you on the slopes of mount Maleth”

Raphael's eye's bulged in their sockets.

The wraith looked at him with an empty stare “surprised? I remember a lot more then you think Raphael, it is the only part of my mind I still mourn. As I recall I kept that promise, I came back after all didn't I” She smirked.

Thinly veiled rage shone in his eyes “Yes you did and you damned everything in keeping it”

Her smile as fake as it was disappeared “it's your choice Raphael, what you choose is not really a concern of mine”

She turned around to leave, as she reached the gates she turned around her head, the faintest resonance of regret in her voice as she said “goodbye Raphael, we will never see each other again, if we do, you will be dead.”

Then she walked right through the solid metal gates and was gone.

Author's Note

I was thinking about about writing an alternate prequel not so far advanced in the story, where ada (the protagonist) is still struggling with her death, not accepting that she has irreversibly changed forever.
The idea was to write her more like two years into the future as a lone wanderer trying to stay away from people alive or dead in a post-war scenario, where the undead have lost their initial leader and are rummaging through the lands without a purpose.
It wouldn't tell as much of what i am planning to do with the story later-on and would create the same hopeless, dark and lonely scenario i was trying to achieve with the original prequel.

So what do you think? should i change the prologue? post a draft of the alternative? or is it fine like this?