| Astra remembered Anina well; she had given Astra some of her earliest
lessons in swordplay and the two had become very close. Astra had been
a girl of ten when the report had come through that Anina had died and,
though even at that young age she had known that showing grief was frowned
on in Aqualaria, she hadn't been able to hold back the tears.
There were two very weird things about all this. One was how the body came to be here. Astra had no idea where she was, but the battlefield on which Anina had died was hundreds of miles from the nearest coast. The other strange thing was that the body showed no sign of decay (or even aging, for that matter) whatsoever as a result of the intervening fifteen years. Had Astra not known better, she would have thought that Anina was merely asleep and might wake up at any moment. Astra almost jumped out of her skin when Anina suddenly sat up and opened her eyes!
|
Anina was a (decay-proof)
zombie.