Snare lives for the chase. According to him, the increased adrenaline tastes so much better than frozen fear. Snare is on the hunt, and the hunt is always on. He’s been known to play with his food by allowing it to escape several times before hunger and boredom rips all flesh apart.
Sophie, age 15
Worldly beyond her years, she’s cunning in all the wrong ways.
The streets are the only home she’s known. Sophie controls every situation, especially those that seem out of her control. She’s the brains behind her grab and ditch plots, and Maurice, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, is the muscle. She doesn’t share any of her boyfriend’s superstitious ideas, but she’s in it for the loot while trudging through the catacombs.
The Sphere Atlas
A vestige from the immortals’ technological age.
The Sphere Atlas is two scrolls that when combined, becomes a living map to every aperture in the world. It is a most rare and sought after device.
Striker
There is no weapon so powerful as a striker.
It takes an immortal years to master the art of summoning a striker. The striker becomes part of the one who wields it. Each striker is unique to its user, absorbing the personality of the one exerting its ability. Strikers glow with translucent shades of blue, green, red, black, purple, and many other colors, each color revealing the heart’s intentions of its master. Strikers manifest with electrical currents, subdued flames, and even ashy smoke, yet like immortals, though strikers are durable, they are not indestructible.
The System
Like the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy, the system needs its subjects to put faith in it, or otherwise, it will crumble.
The system is the embodiment of everything the world offers in exchange for the most precious gifts a person truly possesses, their time and their mind. Immortals are not subject to the system, but all humans are. Rich or poor, famous or infamous, king or peasant, the system owns them all. The system is powered by belief in its processes. The system thrives on ignorance. The system takes from many, and always takes back what it gives the few. The system lies to everyone, because everyone is a slave to the system and its architect.
Vanessa, age 17
An assassin, and Malum’s number one in command, she uses her physical gifts of beauty to get what she wants in this world, with eyes set on loftier things.
The ultimate thespian, Vanessa plays along until she gets what she wants, and then she’ll slit your throat. Another immortal and former knight now turned Shroud, yet she is fully aware of what is going on almost all of the time. She loved someone once, but he betrayed her, so she turned her heart cold to everything else until she sees him again.
Vincent, age 17
Cocky, arrogant, brash, and those are his good qualities.
Never lacking confidence, Vincent is a person of action. Nevertheless, he was tricked into killing his older brother Jak by the dark lord Malum, so when he realized what the Shroud truly was, Vincent went underground. Having one weakness, well, the only one he would ever admit—his love for Noemi, he resurfaced for her and her alone. Of many females who adored him, she was the lone girl who happened to be betrothed to his older brother in marriage. However, she too loved Vincent, and their passion for each other ruined many lives around them, least of all their own. The two were banished by the knighthood, and both thought killed by Malum as traitors to the Shroud, but Revekka knows differently. Vincent is the only immortal that nearly defeated Malum in over a hundred years, but he stopped just short of killing the dark lord to jump from a cliff to save his immortal paramour, Noemi.
Xander, age 16
A teenage agent of the Shroud, he was once on the path to enlightenment, but Malum influenced him otherwise.
One of several hundred young, immortal, former knights, he is, whether he believes it or not, a tool of destruction for the Shroud. Having great, unrestricted power and abilities without direction, Xander truly thinks he is fighting the fine fight. He thinks the knights are evil. He learned, just recently, how they have kept secrets from other immortals, so now he is convinced the knighthood should be eradicated.
Younglings
Hope is strongest with the young, and younglings are those belonging to a group where hope rests as the cure to a sickness growing inside immortalkind.
In five thousand years, there has not been a birth among the immortals, and then many children were born as their parents suddenly aged. Their once immortal parents gave the children as a living sacrifice to the temple for the knighthood, but darkness entered into the hearts of many younglings, and so many of them were led astray.
Joel T. McGrath resides in the beautiful state of New Hampshire with his wife and pets. He is the eighth of nine children and is a nurse by profession. He is a movie and TV aficionado with a penchant for Transformers. Growing up in Boston, he became a lifelong fan of the Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox.
Joel T. McGrath, Something Eternal
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