Way Of The Wraith

Death comes at the end of every road, he had always said, and now it came for him. In a land devoid of memory, one man wakes from death only to discover that it's nothing he could have ever imagined. Within a realm of fear and suffering, demons and angry spirits feed off of the recently deceased. Pain and attachment to the material world torture those that do not understand why they remain earthbound, or why some of them seem to be lucid at all. Stalked by reapers, hated by the living, and betrayed by those he once loved, one man races against time to discover why he remains upon the earth and what it is that he is supposed to accomplish. The end approaches. Not just for him, but for everyone.

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WAY OF THE WRAITHBy SHANON SINNiUniverse, Inc.Copyright © 2011 Shanon SinnAll right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-1526-9Chapter OneA freeze ripped through him and choked him. He could no longer breathe. Icy frosts of a thousand bitter hells clung to him. The chill of an arctic funeral pyre. Black glacial rivers poured into his heart and exploded out through his spine. Somewhere far away the gunshots and explosions seemed unhurried and as warm as mother's milk. He longed already for the pain of a few moments ago, a pain that he had wished then would simply end. That physical searing would seem like such a minor inconvenience now. He heard his voice, a whimper really, in the distance. It did not sound like it should be his voice but somehow he knew that it was. He had no control, as if there was some disconnect. He could not alter these sounds, but he could hear clearly what was said. "So cold ... I love her, promise ... tell her ... So very cold ... My mom ..." There was a cough, a moment of silence and then a sniffle. He heard the crying now. He felt no shame. There was only fear. He spoke aloud, but his fellow soldiers did not seem to hear him as they fired their weapons at the enemy. He thought that perhaps they did not even know that he had ceased to fight. He was vaguely aware, though, that he should be ashamed of his lack of composure. It was a spectacle in the face of the inevitable. His actions contradicted everything that he had believed to be true in his life. His vocalizations on the subject matter of God and the afterlife for so many years seemed so hypocritical and ego-based. There had been no surprises here. Death comes at the end of every road, he had always said. He had known on some level all along that this would happen here, in this very desert and on this very spot. This morning he had known deep down that it would be today. He had felt so strongly that he would never see them again when he had said good-bye. He was so afraid, though, so very afraid. And cold, too. Damn, he was cold. There was a path before him, a warmth of sorts that seemed composed of light. Even from this distance, he could feel the cold being erased from him by this soft yet all-encompassing warmth; he had a vague feeling of being picked up and becoming weightless. Womanly creatures with wings of the softest touch served bottomless cups of honey mead. The scent of jasmine, thick and sweet, clung to them. Forgotten friendships beckoned to him, and relatives were excited to hold him. His memory started to ebb. Upon hearing a whisper of his name, he knew a chair in the great hall awaited him. He started to move towards the light that pierced so fiercely and lovingly through his darkness. So cold. He could see his breath and could smell a thousand banquets and the perfumes of a hundred priceless concubines. He could feel the anticipation of the warriors who wished nothing more than to share the tales of battle and valour. He heard the calling of his childhood dog, the most faithful companion of his life, barking with sheer joy at his inevitable arrival. He wondered if Steve was there as well. There was someone else ... or something, rather. A presence so familiar and grand as to bring tears to the brims of his eyes. One moment she seemed somehow a mother, then a lover. Then there was a different sense, a different being ... a brother and a father and somehow, now, even a son. No, that was wrong. Not a different entity—the same. It was familiar. He knew this one somehow. The mere suggestion of a reunion drove an ethereal, electrical part of him wild. He instinctively moved towards the warm light. He felt peaceful and calm—emotions he had never felt so completely ran deep through to his very core. He felt the cold peeling away from him like a dirty garment, tattered and worn, crumbling beneath a warm, tropical waterfall. He felt forgiven and accepted, tolerated and loved. He felt peace. He would not, could not, look back. Moving with a floating grace, he glided towards the stairway perfect and proud, ancient and inviting. A sigh left him as he surrendered. "No!" A booming voice from behind him roared. "Fight it!" A slight curiosity stalled him for the fraction of a moment. Something crashed up ahead of him. His head turned, and he felt the cold wash over him once more. Behind him was the most chaotic scene imaginable: a nightmare holiday from the minds of serial killers painted with darkness, violence, disease and pestilence. Who had spoken? He felt the way to the light close behind him and started to panic as the warmth suddenly faded away. He was falling, and in falling he found that his feet touched solid ground. He turned quickly and started to bang on a large stone set of towering doors fitted for a castle. He knew that they had not been there before, and maybe did not truly exist there now, and if he blinked even the sight of them would no longer exist. The pathway that was once kind had abandoned him and left him. Nothing beautiful remained in the place where bliss had lived. This way was closed to him forever, and he knew it. Tears of despair crashed out of his eye sockets and ran down his face. His fists pounded against the doors. A screaming wailing howl, so inhuman as to paralyze him to the bones, broke into his manic state. He spun back around in terror as fog descended everywhere. He saw the battle now through newborn eyes. Explosions rocked the hilltops in the darkness, but still they came. They were suicidal riflemen from scores of Muslim nations. Darkness fell heavy around his dead countrymen. Even with the might of the military's colossal bombardment, the battle seemed far from won. Artillery raked the hills, and the carrier's canons strafed the enemy without mercy. The initial improvised explosive device, called IEDs, had crippled the convoy, and an attack now took place that he would never have believed possible if he was not a spectator. It was the Battle of Mogadishu, the Tet Offensive, Blitzkrieg, and the Alamo all upon the same canvas before him. People would die, and individual acts of valour and cowardice would decide the fate of the day. The end seemed incredibly uncertain. This was different than the war of cat and mouse that he had been fighting for his whole tour of duty. This was not the months and years of small firefights and secretly hidden IEDs. Whole tours would go by with a dozen Canadian soldiers killed. Huge operations often yielded only suspected dead insurgents as the enemy dragged off its fallen. This was an engagement the likes of which no one had seen in this country since the initial invasion of 2002. It seemed to defy all logic and intelligence. For a moment the scene stirred something within him. He reached for his rifle, but it was not there. His tour had its fair share of sketchy and fear-riddled moments, but nothing even remotely compared to this. Before this, a very bad day had been when someone he knew had been killed by an IED during a dismounted patrol. This war had no storming of the beaches of Normandy; it had no Vimy Ridge or Passchendaele; it was no Thermopylae. He had seen death and had even been responsible for it in his life ... the arm of tragedy here. He had heard the explosions and seen the Russian machine gun fire from tribal insurgents beat at his weary feet. He had seen a suicide once—and the tattered remains of a headless corpse who had prematurely detonated his own instrument of destruction for reasons unknown. No, this was a new kind of war, and not the Hollywood version of an insurgency that, in reality, took place in shadows and under the cover of darkness, where dawn left no corpses. The battle before him did not seem like it could exist at all, yet it did. He and his companions had been completely taken by surprise by the volume and velocity of an attack that was presumably impossible for the ragtag groups of religious fanatics to orchestrate. He wore only his tan undershirt and combat pants. On his feet were black boots instead of the usual desert issue he had been wearing earlier. Contrarily, his pants were of the desert pattern and not the green worn back in garrison that would be worn with the black boots. His K-bar knife hung at his belt. He seemed to have no other possessions. He looked then at his hands, and they seemed different somehow: not only were they charred and burnt, but they looked like they belonged to a stranger. All of these realizations took place in the span of a moment. The screaming, wailing sound returned and echoed around him, sending a shiver through his frozen reality that was not born from some frigid, unforgiving physical element. He looked at the battle through new eyes, shifting his focus away from the physical as he searched for the source of the sound. He felt them widen in awe as shapes and shadows he had seen, but had seemed to ignore a moment before, began to reveal themselves. He had not seen, truly seen, moments before these shadowy, whispering creatures in flight who were tearing at one another. Dark shapes clashing desperately all around him in smoky, unformed images. There were Roman-dressed shadow soldiers in a phalanx surrounding his fighting countrymen, especially the dismounts that had exited the carriers after the initial IED strikes. They, the living, were pinned down and were dying. These Roman shades, these protectors, were locked in position and being forced back by hordes of the most menacing beings imaginable. Towering, red-eyed creatures neither man nor beast seemed to roll out of inky black clouds of darkness. The Romans displayed no fear but were being torn apart nonetheless. There seemed to be other allies of his living brothers present as well, but these were few and far between. Barely seen women on flying horses flung arrows from the sky. Giant arcs of fire attempted to dismount and destroy them one by one. Huge, transparent, armoured warriors of gleaming gold light appeared from the mouth of a young soldier who was lying behind his weapon, praying. These beings were torn apart by the rat-headed shadow creatures that leapt upon them. There seemed to be other allies present that he could sense but not see, as they were buried behind so much chaos and filthy shadow as to almost make them invisible. A C9 gunner, his section mate, kneeled irrationally out in the open, firing fearlessly with a Hollywood, reckless roar coming from his lips. In front of this gunner, barely perceptible, were two tattooed titans with horned helmets and braided beards. One wielded a monstrous axe, and the other had a colossal stone hammer. Together they carved such a path into the advancing hordes of darkness in a berserker rage that he wondered if the machine gunner could be harmed at all. Here and there on the side of his countrymen were beings of all sorts in chalky, braided shadow—dragons and creatures as dark and intimidating looking as the enemies ... but they were far too few. The screaming, wailing sound ripped through him again. He knew that scream sounded for him. Something was coming—something more menacing than anything that he had witnessed on what he discerned was some madman puppeteer's playground. Something omnipotent wanted him. For some reason he knew this. He scanned the dark, writhing masses for the source of this newest terror. It pushed through the hordes, throwing aside anything that blocked its path. The being stood a full half body above the swarming chaos and held aloft a tangled-handled scythe with an impossibly long blade. The weapon was held above a black-cloaked, skeleton-like face. The spectre did not appear to touch the ground but hovered through the battle. Weapons that passed through the dark garment seemed to displace the fabric, which would scatter outwards in shards and return to take the form of a cloak once more. To his horror he realized that this exploding and reforming coat was composed entirely of what looked to be flying insects, all dark in color. He tried to focus his eyes and see the terror as more than a distant shadow, and he was rewarded somewhat as the being came slightly more into focus. As the shade threw back its head and shrieked once more, he saw the white of the skull was not what he had supposed, composed of bone, but a writhing mass of maggots feasting upon the face itself—and one another. The eyes, perhaps the most frightening aspect of all, were surprisingly human and bulbous. These whites were blood red, and the pupil was black as hate. A grin that to him was both frightening and homicidally self- amused completed the face. He threw his hands over his ears and screamed in terror. The foreign shrieking sound had paralyzed him and had frozen his legs to the ground. Never in his wildest nightmares could he have imagined such horror, and yet what frightened him more than the evil appearance and the unholy wail was an innate knowledge that the creature before him was somehow commonplace in this foreign yet familiar landscape. Skeletal hands pulled back the scythe and started to swing it at an impossible speed. He leaned away, raising his arms in a gesture of self- preservation. A ringing sound exploded around him. The clash made him start and look up quickly. A shadowy man in a black cloak held a shimmering sword before the scythe. His features were wrapped in shadow, and the cloak hovered madly around him. The unexpected saviour was struggling to hold back the enormous blade, which was being pushed downward. "The mosque!" It was a strangely familiar voice, the same voice that had called out to him before. Now it was filled with urgency and dread. "Run!" The harvester of souls hooked around his jagged blade and flicked his wrist, flinging the dark-cloaked man to the side and into the earth like a ragdoll. It was clear that he would not likely be any more help to him in the immediate future. However, he had known at once of the mosque about which the man had spoken. Another lifetime ago—or what had seemed so long ago but was perhaps only a half hour or less before—he had seen it at the last village. He started to run. His legs barely seemed to move. He felt like he was in one of those childhood dreams where he seemed to be running through water. He knew the creature would come for him. He knew the horror would overcome him. He knew that this would happen soon. He passed into the thickest of the chaos, trying to confuse the beast. It seemed to work to a slight degree; the creature waded into the battle behind him while swinging the bladed weapon wildly. He stepped over some familiar bodies and stopped short. He saw himself, or what he thought was once himself, but he looked burnt as if by fire. A flash of a thousand half-formed memories entered him, and remorse washed over him. He felt the shame of a thousand selfish deeds, a million lies to himself and others, and a billion self-righteous, ego-based desires. He wanted to stay and stare at himself, or what had been him, but he knew that he could not. He wanted to try to remember what name he had been called before he moved on. There was a hesitation as the tug-of-war struggled between what had been his life and his new sudden need for self-preservation. A winged warrior woman of brilliant light suddenly appeared beside him. She crouched and cradled out of a nearby body a man he knew he had loved in life. It was the cocky machine gunner who had seemed protected by the two large Viking warriors, who were no longer nearby. She lifted an electric twin image of the deceased from out of the body. She held him as a mother would hold a long lost son, and this somehow broke his heart. He felt so alone and abandoned. The spirit in turn started to wake, as if from a sleep, in the valkyrie's arms. The pair seemed oblivious to his observant existence. He knew that this deceased friend was feeling something akin to the warm light that he had been denied. His trance was ruptured by the tragedy that befell them next. A wild swing of the harvester's blade meant for him ripped the cradled soul in half. There was a blue flash as the spirit dripped to the ground like melting wax. For but a moment, there was a sense of surprise from the reaper as he took a step back. He had crossed a line that should not have ever been crossed. The valkyrie's face contorted, and her beauty was replaced by a maw of fangs that screamed for revenge. Her hair was wild golden fire, and her eyes were the red of the storm's ocean dawn. A silver sword of light, almost Japanese in nature, flew from a sheath as she advanced towards the reaper. (Continues...) Excerpted from WAY OF THE WRAITHby SHANON SINN Copyright © 2011 by Shanon Sinn. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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