Atop the tallest tower in Mooncrown City's Oak District, the elven lookout Laryel could barely hold himself upright.
He leaned against a broken oak railing, his once-spotless, silver-embroidered leather armor covered in ash and dried red blood. The eyes his wife had once praised as being like the morning star now held nothing but bottomless exhaustion and despair.
Below him, the city he had protected for three ages was dying.
Streets that had once flowed with moonlight magic were now clogged with thick green fel sludge and rubble.
Silverleaf Forest Square, celebrated in the songs of bards, had become a breeding ground where demons hatched twisted egg sacs.
The mage tower, white as a crescent moon and soaring into the clouds, had snapped in half. Ominous black smoke still curled around the break. Demonic roars mingled with the dying cries of elven warriors, forming a requiem for a civilization.
Another wave of berserker demons charged through a sparse rain of arrows, assaulting the defensive line of animated thorns and elven flesh and blood in the Oak District's last remaining street.
Laryel lowered his head. Through the gaps in the oak, he could see young half-elven warriors falling beneath the monsters' crushing blows, their faintly glowing blood staining their ancestral armor red.
He closed his eyes, almost able to picture the defensive line collapsing in the next instant and the elven city falling completely.
"...Moon Goddess above, please guide your lost children..."
He murmured his prayer, his voice so hoarse that even he could no longer recognize the master bard whose singing had once been renowned at court.
Just then, an unusual, low rumble drowned out all the noise of the battlefield, coming from the sea.
Laryel's eyes snapped open, and he looked toward the waters beyond the harbor.
At first,