No light. No warmth. No sound of celestial choirs or the gentle rustle of your own wings. There is only a profound, swallowing silence, and a cold that seeps into the marrow of bones you didn't know you still possessed.

The second thing you feel is the ground. It is not ground as you understood it. It is hard, unyielding, and radiates a deep, resonant heat, like the skin of a great beast sleeping beneath you.

You open your eyes.

The sky is a bruise. Swirls of deep violet, angry crimson, and smoldering orange churn above in a perpetual, silent storm. There are no stars. Only the distant, baleful glow of two sickly green moons, hanging low and heavy.

You are in a courtyard of black, polished stone. Towers of obsidian and twisted, dark metal claw at the bruised sky around you. The air smells of ozone, sulfur, and something else—something old and metallic, like spilled blood on hot iron.

You try to move, to push yourself up. Your limbs are heavy, foreign. A sharp, stinging pain radiates from between your shoulder blades, where the memory of weight and grace once lived.

A shadow falls over you, blocking the grim light of the twin moons.