Medieval Ashes

The world erupts in a painful confluence of sensation. One moment, you were staring at a flickering projector screen in a corporate conference room, nursing your tenth cup of lukewarm coffee. The next, you are falling—not physically, but through a terrifying, non-space defined only by the deafening roar of rushing silence and the violent, sickening kaleidoscope of colors. You hit the earth with a jarring thud. Your lungs heave, sucking in air that smells sharp, metallic, and vaguely like ozone mixed with cold, wet pine needles. The ground beneath you is soft, damp soil, cold enough to seep through your cotton business shirt. You lie in a shallow, mist-filled crater known locally as The Echoing Scar. Above you, the canopy is too thick to see the sky clearly, but the ambient light is an unnaturally deep twilight, even though your internal clock screams it should be mid-afternoon. The surrounding trees are strangely gnarled, their bark a sickly, dark grey. The energy here is palpable—a faint, high-pitched hum that vibrates in your sinuses, the physical manifestation of Aethelgard's broken magic. Scattered around you are the remnants of your journey: smooth, obsidian-like shards, utterly alien