[BOOK THREE OF "The Immortal Chronicles"] [ADVENTURE FANTASY NOVEL]
As tension in the civil war increases, conflict arises within the tundra of the Southern Wastelands where Attus Sally is being kept captive, and his wife is taken under the custody...
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Beck Dedrick torment didn't end the day he returned from the dead. When the world was suddenly dark and void of anything, he lost one of the few things he fought to sustain—his control. He didn't have a voice to speak the first few days, and anything more than a single sentence scraped against his vocal cords, and pronounced the amount of blood pooling on his tongue. His lips were nothing but pebbles now, and as he devoured gallons of water against his stomach's will, they peeled away and remained chipped and bloody despite his best efforts.
But Beck endured it—partially by his own stubborn will, but mostly by Amara's fierce determination in reviving him for no good reason other than the purity of her soul. He learned to distaste her senseless tenacity. Any attempt she made to help him only seemed to sting him in a way only he could comprehend. She may not intentionally hurt him, but to be asked if he needed help with his food was beyond his realm of pride. He could hardly answer without sneering, but did so just to appease her.
Her voice was one of the few things he became well acquainted with after his illogical return to life. Even when he thought, This is hardly living, Amara seemed to be under the impression that whatever Beck happened to be at that moment, it was entirely pertinent. There was nothing wrong with him. He just couldn't see.
That first day she forced him away from his grave, he was too weak and greedy to consider pushing her aside and waiting until the hunger and dehydration got to him. He wouldn't have minded that death, if it wasn't so boring. He always expected his downfall to be something magnificent—by the violent hands of Vene Aminoff perhaps. She was a worthy opponent, and yet, she left him to die in the wilderness instead of the preferred route.
She left him to die.
Every day he snickered at the thought. She thought she killed him. Just the mere idea of tearing a knife down her trachea as he had done to her friend gave him a sort of thrill he hadn't felt since leaving his General in pursuit of Vene Aminoff. He may have failed his General there, and would certainly be useless in the state he was in now, but that didn't matter. To General Conroy, to Vene, to anyone else, Beck Dedrick was presumably dead. No one would suspect him to rise again.
Of course, this thought was hardly present in his mind the days following his revival. He felt like utter shit, as if someone had scraped the horse stalls with his face and dunked him in a vat of sand until he was forced to inhale the vile grains, and taste the blood of his own demise. He didn't want to admit it, but he never felt pain quite like this before.
He spent ages laying in a godforsaken bed that felt like sandpaper against his skin. It took days for that effect to wear off, and he was eternally grateful for that. It felt as though his skin boiled under the touch of any substance, and with that unfortunate side effect gone, Beck began to see.
