• The world as we know it has ended. The year is 2150, a century after the cataclysmic event that ended civilization, an event people refer to as the Descent. The world's once proud cities are now nothing more than rubble, monuments to a time long gone. Fragments of glass, concrete, and steel fill the streets. Silence reigns across the wasteland the world has become, cars are now nothing more than hollow husks, the metal pieces taken for other uses.
    Few buildings remain standing, those few that do look to have been ripped apart by explosions and the elements themselves. Atop the ruins of one such building stands a single person dressed in black. They are one of the many humans left alive, one of the few that still retain their sanity. In this city, there are four groups struggling to exist: the Scions, a religious cult that prays to a God that no longer listens; the Crazed, the multitudes of humans that went insane for one reason or another; the Shadows, a group of mercenaries that do anything so long as they continue to exist. Their payment? Food, water, the few things that can be used for clothing, and anything more that could be used for survival; and finally, there are the Corpses, the bodies of the dead, under the control of a parasite that found its way from a government facility.

    The person atop the ruined building is a Shadow, a mercenary known only as Harbinger. He wears the uniform of the Shadows: a black coat with a hood, dark red - almost black- pants, and a pair of nearly worn-out boots, taken from an old Pre-Descent army base. His eyes seem to glow an almost unearthly red as the light from the moon shines across the ruins. Each breath he takes stings as cold air fills his lungs. It must be...winter, or close to it. Below, he can hear the echoes of footsteps. Someone must be running. Angry roars join the footsteps. Corpses, he thinks as the roars are replaced by cries of pain and, an even rarer sound, gunfire. "Every day I come up here...wondering what could have caused all of this," he says to no one. He can remember the pictures he has seen, the few that have not been burned or aged beyond recognition. Buildings that tower over all, people smiling, and the great things that had once existed. Once more, footsteps echo from the street.
    Before he can begin to climb down, a familiar phrase enters his mind, one he remembers from when he was a child, one that each Shadow was required to know. "A new day begins, yet more horrors await us all," he said as the sun began to rise, bathing the ruined city in light.