Deep in the jagged throat of the Northern passes, where the wind screams through ice-slicked canyons, the world had turned into a nightmare of violet and black.
The hooded figure stood upon a jagged outcropping of obsidian, his silhouette a tear in the fabric of the white wilderness. He did not shiver against the sub-zero gale, the cold seemed to recoil from him as if he were a furnace of dark energy. Beneath the heavy, tattered hem of his cloak, the ground was not covered in snow, but in a pulsing, vein-like network of blackened frost.
He raised a hand, his fingers long and skeletal, clutching a shard of the corrupted Stone.
"Wake," he whispered, a sound that carried further than the wind.
The magic didn't manifest as a bolt of light, but as a sickening ripple in the air. From the shard, a thick, oily miasma of dark mana began to spill, coiling around the base of the cliffs like a nest of snakes.
As the miasma touched the cave entrances below, the silence was shattered.
