The clouds are gone, and there is no breeze. A sun rises, but his light is barely beating behind the shadow of something dark and thick. A moon rises too, but she's heavy and dead in the sky. Her faint white surface turned sickening red. What little light is left casts a pale red glow over everything. There are no stars in the sky, not even one. The last one fell before you arrived.

The castle remains, but in ruins. The island it rested on has sunk deep into the ground, moat water welling shallow around the edges. The castle-shape you can recognize, but it looks to be centuries deserted. Plant-life might have flourished here, forcing it's greedy way through every crack, but that dawning has passed. Now nearly everything is dead and dying. Brittle vines entangle the stronger walls, both inside and out, the roof has long since collasped.The river still runs freely into the moat, but the water is tainted, bad, and tastes of blood. The very thought of drinking it makes you sick, and the act of it will certainly kill you.

The land is perfectly flat. The hills are gone, and there are no inclines. There's an ash like substance on the ground, and you think it might have been grass, because there isn't any of that anymore. The trees are black and burnt up, maybe a forest fire had just been calmed.

Further passage into the deep leafless trees will reveal bands of people huddled together in makeshift tents. They came here to escape the city, and if you ask them why, they'll say it's best here. Maybe you can't believe that, but there's no way to know for sure. They're starving, and some are injured -- if there is a better place they haven't found it. Their clothes are worn, and it doesn't seem that there's enough to go around. It's odd then that almost every one has managed to cover their right hand. Those who haven't, all have a similar circular scar. Some will tell you this is the government's fault, some blame God. Just be careful they don't blame you.

Explore a little more, and maybe you'll notice bits of machinery littering the grounds. Most of it useless, some of it not. The land appears almost as a battleground; the final impression of a strange war fought between technology and nature, where both sides lost. Even worn and broken, the technology seems so advanced for the date you find glowing through an oversized and stagnant digital clock misaligned to a building's outer wall. The clock never changes, and if you get close enough you can barely make out the date through broken solar powered cells: December 21st, 2021.

Keep exploring, and you may wish you hadn't. There's something strange towards the North. You could tell yourself it's just a statue, but that's harder than it should be. At a mere seven feet tall, the rearing unicorn is both meek and fierce. Its made of stone that's cracking, and the giant fault line under it's belly looks like it could split the whole thing apart at any moment. The odd thing is, there doesn't seem to be any reason it's here. There isn't anything else around, and the spot where it's unimpressive stone base lay seems accidental, at best. Stay long enough and you swear you can almost hear the sound of hoof beats pounding in the distance...

Humans