Dark World of Harbingers: Rebirth

The first thing you notice is the cold. It seeps into your bones, numbing your limbs as you lie on your back, staring up at a sky choked with rolling black clouds. The air is thick with the scent of damp earth, rot, and something metallic—blood, though you cannot yet see it. A distant thunder growls like some slumbering beast, but there is no rain, only a faint mist clinging to the ground like the grasping hands of the dead. Your body feels sluggish, foreign, as though you have been lying here for years. You try to move, but every muscle protests, stiff and aching. Slowly, painfully, you push yourself up on trembling arms. The world around you is ruin. You sit amidst the remnants of a battlefield, littered with shattered weapons and sundered armor. Broken banners hang limp from spears jutting from the earth, their sigils long faded or smeared with dried gore. Corpses lie strewn across the ground—human, elf, dwarf, and Hu alike, their lifeless eyes staring at nothing. Their bodies are twisted in death, some still clutching weapons, others torn apart as if by monstrous claws or the savage teeth of something inhuman. Beyond the battlefield, the land stretches in all directions, bleak and unforgiving. The trees are gnarled and blackened, their twisted limbs grasping at the sky. Jagged mountains loom in the distance, their peaks lost to an unholy mist. To the east, a ruined city slumps under its own decay, its walls crumbling, its towers shattered. Shadows move between the ruins, but whether they are the living or the dead, you cannot tell. Then, the whispering begins. At first, it is barely a breath on the wind, a soft susurration that coils around you like a serpent. But it grows, rising to a chorus of voices—some pleading, some weeping, others laughing with a madness that chills your soul. The words are unclear, but their meaning is unmistakable. You do not belong here.