Purple lightning tore through the heavens, its brilliance refracting across the churning sky. Yet, the storm held its breath, no thunder to announce its ferocity. The world below flickered in its violet glow, buildings strange, yet hauntingly familiar, carved into fleeting fragments of memory.
A dense mist coiled around the streets like a sentient thing, its movement slow and deliberate, a warning murmured in a language long lost to time. The air was heavy with the sharp tang of blood, the bitter ash of smoldering ruin, and the metallic, ancient weight of Time itself.
Zerina knew this place. Even as the lines between waking and dreaming blurred, even as the edges of reality frayed and unraveled, she recognized where she had been dragged. Darkbrook. The name surfaced unbidden, carrying with it a chill that settled into her marrow. Was this a dream or had they found her?
Another silent fracture of lightning painted the streets, and this time, the truth revealed itself in grotesque clarity. Corpses sprawled where they had fallen, faceless masses littering the cobblestones. Blood seeped from their wounds, converging into a dark river that wound its way toward the square. There, the fountain stood, a sinister altar defiled by the crimson tide.
A man cloaked in shimmering amethyst loomed before it, his robes flowing like the currents of some otherworldly stream. Around the fountain, crimson runes blazed to life, their glow pulsing like the rhythm of a heartbeat. The sight was mesmerizing, the symmetry of the glowing script juxtaposed with the chaos of the scene.
Then, the silence shattered.
"The end is coming..." The words were a blade of sound, splitting the oppressive quiet. The voice echoed not from the man, but from everywhere at once, a whisper shaped from the void itself.
Zerina jolted awake, her breath shallow and her skin slick with cold sweat. The fragile cocoon of sleep unraveled, leaving her clutching the edges of the rough blanket like a lifeline. She sat motionless in the dim room, her mind a storm of fractured memories that refused to settle.
The dreams had come again. Not dreams, she corrected herself, glimpses of something more for dreams didn’t bleed into your waking hours. Dreams didn’t leave shadows etched beneath your eyes and the echo of whispers hanging in the stale morning air.
The Cult of the blood god Ok'tash. Zealots cloaked in black and amethyst robes, their faces shrouded in shadows from heavy hoods. She had been born into this world, this firey bloody abyss, only Zerina hadn’t realized the fire would consume her. Their rituals, their chants, the darkened chambers where the air seemed thick with malice, it was all seared into her mind.
She pressed a trembling hand to her chest, as though she could feel the ghost of the brand they had burned into her skin. The mark of the Ok'Tash had long since faded, but its presence lingered like an unseen tether to the life she had left behind.
Even now, alone in her refuge, Zerina felt their gaze upon her. It was irrational, she knew. The cult had fractured, scattered like ash in the wind after her escape. But their voices, those chilling, harmonic chants, they lived on in her dreams, clawing their way to the surface no matter how she tried to bury them.
Zerina rose, her feet padding softly across the wooden floor. She moved to the window, pulling aside the heavy curtain just enough to let a sliver of sunlight pierce the gloom. Outside, the world seemed oblivious to her torment, bathed in the golden light of dawn. With a sigh she would cast a spell of Clumsy on herself, to ease the burden of her painful past. Though it did little to suppress the fear that would grip her from time to time.
She envied that world, the way it turned with indifference to her pain. But envy alone wouldn’t save her. She knew that to truly escape the cult of Ok'Tash, to sever the last threads of their hold on her, she would need to confront her past. Dreams, after all, were only shadows of something far more dangerous lurking just beyond the edges of waking life.
What she did not know was that he cult was here. And more powerful than ever, led by the same man in her "dreams".
Her past had come for her in the present, and will darken the future of all in the lands she has come to call home.