Melena - Just grown to womanhood, you are beautiful and supple with long blonde hair.

Your name is Melena, just become an adult but the object of so many fantasies among the young men of Gutandor. Your blonde tresses shine in the sunlight and your muscular body is as hale as a warrior, yet as soft in all the right places to make men sigh as you pass them by in the street. Your full lips and large breasts are the envy of women from crone to tavern wench, your long legs and firm ass the objects of desire for leering lunks.

But that was before the attack. Now you are huddling beneath an iron tub with a a young man you know little and hoping to survive an unthinkable horror.

You have known Hans for only the night, holding each other close but too terrified to realize that you were doing it. When dawn comes you remove the iron tub from above you and your senses are bombarded with the reality of a world entirely different from when you hid. The village is in ruins and everywhere is the smell of fire and burned flesh.

It is then that you notice Hans's weakness, his body covered with a glistening layer of sweat. The prophet had given him the shining stone, but he presses it into your hand and bids you leave without him. You hesitate and he shouts, his voice quivering with exertion. He smiles finally and pats you on the shoulder.

"Good luck, Melena," he sighs and leans against a smoking timber. "I would never make the journey with you."

For three days you cross the rolling hills between Gutendor and the Dragon's Spine Mountains. The devastation the armies of the underworld have caused is immeasurable. Everywhere are dead animals, picked nearly clean by the hungry mouths of the army. Sometimes you happen upon a ransacked homestead, but never a trace of life. Only the crows keep you company, searching for rotting flesh and calling out to one another when it's found.

When you reach the foothills at the end of the third day's travel you spot a light burning in the top window of a crumbling keep to the south. It is not marked on the map and is ominous in appearance. Only an hour's travel further east are the caves the prophet told you to rest in before you make your way up the mountainside. To the north is a village, only two hours travel by your guess, which may still be intact or at the least have some food for your hungry belly.

It isn't marked on the map, but you also recall an old trade route that once ran from your village far to the east. It is only a few hours north-east. It was often beset by bandits, so became disused and rarely-traveled. However, there is a chance it could provide a faster route inland.

You pull your cloak's hood away from your hair and survey your surroundings. You must make your decision soon.