A Land Without Mercy

The world above had become a vision out of nightmare, a wasteland that felt carved from the marrow of despair itself. The sky was a blackened shroud, its clouds fat with ash, bleeding faint streaks of crimson where the fires below reflected upward like the veins of a diseased heart. The air was poison, acrid and heavy, stinging the throat with every shallow breath.

What had once been Los Angeles now resembled a kingdom of ruin, a mockery of civilization. Towering buttes of twisted steel and shattered stone jutted from the ground like jagged monuments to failure—grotesque parodies of Monument Valley, but instead of nature’s slow sculpting, these had been assembled from the waste of fallen buildings, crushed homes, and the bones of a forgotten people. They rose like broken teeth from a corpse’s jaw, black against the dim glow of the horizon.

Fires raged without mercy, feeding on the endless wreckage. They weren’t just fires anymore, but living hungers, crawling across the land, swallowing what little remained. The few figures who still wandered the ashen ground did so like shadows, half-mad survivors trudging through smoke with hollow eyes, searching for anything—water, shelter, or even just the faint illusion of meaning. Their desperation made them phantoms, unmoored from time, drifting across a city that no longer remembered itself.

The land itself seemed aware of its death, as though Los Angeles had absorbed the weight of its corruption and decay and now wore it like a funeral shroud. The silence between the flames was suffocating, broken only by the crackle of burning refuse and the distant groan of collapsing ruins. Here, hope was not merely lost—it had been buried, scorched, and ground into dust.

And yet, within the despair, whispers lingered—rumors of entrances hidden beneath the wasteland. Passages into the underworld, where freedom fighters endured, biding their time in the dark. To reach them, the wandering shadows had to pass through the inferno itself. The flames did not burn them; they parted like veils, as though fire itself wanted them to go on, to descend. For only below, in the secret places untouched by the ruin, did a chance remain.

Above, the world was Mordor incarnate: a land without mercy, without promise. Below, perhaps, was something different. Something worth dying for.