Overhead lay a dark, blood-red sky, with blue ash drifting down like snow.
Morien opened his eyes and found himself inside an enormous impact crater.
A tangled mechanical structure hung above him, and several collapsed wooden houses stood in the distance.
The sky was blood-red. Looking out, he could make out faint lines overhead, dividing it into unimaginably vast squares.
This place had probably once been a village. There was no telling when it had been built, only that a hunk of metal had later fallen from the sky and smashed it into a crater.
The fallen hunk of metal looked like a ship, presumably a Gnome airship. Something had blasted it apart, sending it crashing down.
That was precisely why most human settlements hid underground. Villages on the surface were all too prone to disaster, yet the source of that disaster did not necessarily harbor any malice toward humans. More often than not, it had never even noticed those insignificant people.
The traveler Morien had arrived in just such a world.
Not long ago, when he first arrived, he had opened his eyes to find himself in this crater. Unfortunately, black ash had been falling from the sky at the time.
That was what remained of the corpses of the Elf after they died, a lethal poison to the overwhelming majority of living things, including humans.
Contact with exposed flesh would char the skin. If it entered the eyes, it caused blindness. If swallowed, it melted the internal organs.
He had appeared in that environment utterly unprotected. Fortunately, there was a heap of steel nearby, and he had barely managed to crawl inside, but his body
had still suffered grievous damage, leaving him lying on the ground, waiting to die.
Now, however, all his injuries had healed in an