Stacy STEPHENS and Cindy JACKSON

Planet Earth: A resplendent and pristine garden paradise, spins now swathed and tainted with violence and disease, pain and poverty, greed and apathy. Like a dark murky halo, misery radiates outwards from the dazzling sphere, dense and heavy into the atmosphere.

It is the Ancient Ones who recognize the formation of the massive shadow as an entity of all Earth's suffering and sorrow. These Great Ones discern the sinister shadow as fashioned of fear and the essence of human negativity.

The colossal shadow known as The Wraith circles the world of wretchedness. It soars high in the darkness of night, seeking out the most heinous and the most despicable of humans. It possesses many, instantly coagulating their blood, bursting their hears, collapsing their brains. It is their detestable souls it wants. It captures their departing spirits and alters and mutates them into black ghostly minions. Commanding its newborn shadow-soldiers to destroy and multiply, they instinctively possess humans, turning them into savage, murdering zombies. Having been fashioned from a human spirit, these newly spawned shadow-ghouls are not as strong as their miscreant creator nor as immediately destructive to their human host bodies. However, the ill-fated over-shadowed humans directly begin to exhibit symptoms like that of terminally advanced diseases and experience a rapid deterioration of their flesh and cannot live to be held captive long. Their minds and wills are controlled supreme with extreme violent tendencies; their only mandate is to kill. These senseless zombies, with broken and decaying bodies pushed beyond their corporal limits are unable to find release even in death. At the demise of their pawns, the shadows quickly transmute the departing spirits into shadow people, thus expediting the shadow and the zombie population exponentially around the globe.

The shadows, indestructible and hindered only by light and sunshine, seek to eradicate all humans and their lower life cohabitants and usher in a new world that emits such an infinite
darkness that it will consume the power of the sun.

The tale is character driven by three individuals aligned along the west coast of northern California. The story alternates between these three, on separate paths in cities far removed and in lives most dissimilar, as they seek physically and spiritually to find each other. For collectively, if they can find the strength and the will to survive, they share one destiny.

Grace Hampton: The exquisite beauty of the 19 year old is held in sharp contrast to the hideous scar that runs long and wide over the left side of Grace's face causing her loveliness to be all the more prominent and captivating. It is at the frightening hands of her abhorrently cruel and fanatically religious parents that her face is burned and marked for her sin of vanity for all to witness at the vulnerable age of thirteen. Now, six years later, after untold sadistic abuses, all in the name of God, she grips desperately to the dreamlike memory of a young man who had briefly come to her with blessed comfort the night of her fiery chastisement. Grace clings to the hope of his return as she and a smattering of others bravely attempt to do battle against her small town’s ever increasing, homicidal zombies as her time in this world may not be long endured.

Lily Maddison: Only 5, Lily is intellectually gifted, precognitive, and sightless and her family is the epitome of American materialism. . When a tragedy beyond imagining shatters her perfect world, she finds herself alone, lost, and hunted by unspeakable terror in a cold and forbidding forest. Blind, yet she is mysteriously blessed with the gradual auras of second sight, she stumbles through the midnight forest hunted by both zombies and shadows. Her only hope of surviving even a few more hours is Grace, who is 200 miles away and has yet to realize the little girl is real.

Aeden Stone: At an astonishing 397 years old, Aeden appears to be no more than 23. Moving at the speed of thought, eternally youthful, and with power beyond imagining, he possesses the strength and supremacy of a vampire. With an air of majesty and the countenance of a rock star, he stalks the dark and gloomy, mist shrouded streets of San Francisco. With great vigilance and perception, he quests for victims of the night. Most women are uncontrollably attracted to him; many men want to emulate him, while others only fear him. Aeden alone carries the ability to destroy the shadows at will and his method is so simplistic it is startling. Possessing all the hypnotic romance of fictitious vampirism sans the need for blood, Aeden, in our real world, is possible.

The Wraith: From the vestiges of the ruins of Monrovia, after the catastrophic earthquake and mammoth tidal waves had guaranteed the city's utter and absolute destruction and from the pitiful suffering of fifteen homeless orphans rises up a specter of such might, with such evil intent, that none can stand before it and live. Monrovia’s indigenous residents had existed in a horrifying man made hell so torturous it was beyond mortal words. It is by their sorrow that the great shadow shrouds the city; it is by their screams that it solidifies and takes form. The phantom of woe is fear and hate and pain incarnate, and it is evolving.

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