The Shattering: Mad Rats

My life fades. My vision dims.
All that remain are memories.
I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. This wasted land.
But most of all, I remember the Orc Warrior.
The man we called "Rats".
To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time.
When the world was powered by the blue mana, and the sky sprouted great cities of stone and crystal.
Gone now, swept away.
For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.
Without city portals, they were nothing. They'd built a world of straw.
The laggy hubs sputtered and stopped.
Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the cataclysm.
Their world crumbled.
The cities exploded.
A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear.
Men began to feed on men.

In the roar of a volcano he lost everything.
And he became a shell of a man. A burnt out, desolate man.
A man haunted by the demons of his past.
A man who wandered out into the wastelands.
And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again.