Tom Riddle woke up.

You have no idea how grateful he was for that. He remembered everything that had happened. He remembered the basilisk killing Myrtle, he remembered the ritual, and he remembered the fading out of his... existence? Then there was nothing, and now, he was awake.

The fact that he was still alive, or at least, conscious, and that was enough really, was enough of a surprise and relief that for quite some time he simply lay still on the ground, breathing (thank God, Merlin and Magic!) and thinking about what had happened.

The fact that he remembered nothing between the fading out, and the awaking, was terrifying. It only proved to him that death really was emptiness. Because of his sins, shouldn't he at least have been sent to Hell?

When he was finally able to concentrate on something other than being alive, he noticed that he wasn't in the bathroom anymore. He was lying in the dirt somewhere. Sitting up, he could immediately tell that he was not at Hogwarts anymore. In fact, it didn't even look like Britain.

The soil was an odd reddish-brown, like he had seen in pictures of Australia once in a colourful issue of some muggle magazine he found in the ruins of a destroyed house during the Blitz. But this didn't look like Australia either. This wasn't a desert, there were trees all around him.

And the trees were all dead, grey and withered. The grass, where the ground wasn't simply dirt, was brown and dry. The sky was covered in dark clouds. He could hear no animals in the distance, not even birds chirping in the trees.

He absent-mindedly scooped up some dirt with his hand and stared at it. The colour was odd, but the texture was different too, more clumpy and unnatural. It was almost like it had rusted together somehow.

Throwing the dirt back to the ground, he finally stood up with a slight groan, something felt off about this place, in his core. As well as the strange appearance, magic felt different. Stronger, but more wild. Darker, but in an undefinable way.

He was still wearing his uniform, silver-green tie and prefect badge at his chest. His wand was lying in the dirt a few feet away, and when he grabbed it he felt another strong rush of this place's strange magic.

"Point me, Hogwarts!"

Nothing happened. Perhaps that was due to the castle's wards.

"Point me, Hogsmeade!"

Again nothing... Why wouldn't that have worked? Attempts at finding 'London', 'England', 'Britain', 'Europe' and finally a very worried 'Earth' all failed...

Maybe he is in Hell after all.

"God-damned Slughorn, why the hell did I do that stupid..." the dead forest was completely silent except for his grumbling, and the surroundings all looked identical. Finally, he attempted "Point me, people..." and the spell spun him around on the spot, wand towards another unexceptional cluster of dead trees.

Well. Hopefully they don't turn out to be demons. Tom started walking.

Stepping over rotting tree roots and through the thin, decaying undergrowth, he walked for hours before there was even the slightest change in the surroundings. Eventually he stopped in a small clearing, transfigured a lump of wood into a cup and used an aguamenti spell to get some water.

He was a bit hungry too, but all he had on him was his wand, and everyone knew it was impossible to create food via magic. All there was to do was keep walking and hope the people had something to eat.

"Point me, people."

More forest. Great.

Elsewhere

"What was this village called, does anyone even know?" the man on the left asked quietly, but in the dead silence of the clearing everyone heard him.

"Ragham." came another low voice eventually, "Went through here once... Stables was a right mess."

There weren't any stables left in Ragham. There wasn't anything at all really, and that included people. This part of Lordaeron had been badly hit during the initial plague, and the Scourge had seen to any survivors long ago.

All that was left were decaying, twisted ruins, and now that the men had been through, a few dozen finally still corpses of the former inhabitants. In a few minutes, they would set fire to the ruined buildings and erase the tiny village for good.

"Mhh..." an older man grunted, lighting his pipe. When he had a spark, he took a puff, before stepping forwards and throwing the match into the tuft of dead grass they had piled in front of one of the ruins.

There were more than a dozen, heavily armed and armoured men and women in the clearing. They had arrived in the village a few hours before, charged with putting down whatever undead they found and taking or destroying anything that could be used by the Scourge.

The fire spread easily through the dead, dry grass and half-collapsed wooden structures.

As Ragham burnt, the Scarlet Crusaders formed back into their loose patrol order and began to march down the overgrown path that used to be a road, thanking the Light that they hadn't had to burn any of their number today.

They had a small amount of loot with them to take to their base, mostly farm tools and a few old books, and then they could rest. Tomorrow, another band of Crusaders would go on another expedition to another destroyed village.

Lordaeron may have been destroyed, but the war was not over. So long as a drop of Scarlet blood flowed through a Lordaeronian's veins, the war would go on.

Elsewhere

"We're running out of supplies." Yren sighed, as it wasn't as if the others didn't already know, "I don't think we can stay active much longer. We've only got a few weeks supplies left. We might need to think about... evacuating from Lordaeron."

"I am not going to leave this land to the Scourge." the young half-elf woman said, once again. She was the leader of this warband, and they would follow her to the end. She was Finnall Goldensword, former resident of Dalaran, and secret daughter of Lord Admiral Daelin Proudmoore.

She had fought the scourge from the early days of their takeover, when the ruling council of Dalaran had refused to send aid to their neighbours, and instead surrounded themselves with thick and powerful magical shields. Since the shields went up, nobody had gone in, or come out, of the city.

They had even abandoned their own people in the territories once ruled by Dalaran, in villages like those in the Silverpine Forest, where Finnall had been training with a local militia when the shields went up. These men followed her still, those that were left anyway.

Her father, the human king of Kul'Tiras had once come to see her, early on in the Scourging, and tried to convince her to leave Lordaeron. There were Tirasian colonies in Kalimdor now, places with names like Theramor or Tiragarde, though they hadn't had any news from the outside for months now.

Her warband had started with that small militia, as well as volunteers, who had over time found and joined the band. They had also gathered survivors from the ruins, sending the civilians to one of the few surviving bastions such as Tyrs Hand and what they now referred to as the "enclave".

They didn't find any survivors anymore. Those that were left were all associated with one of the bands of wandering soldiers fighting against the Scourge, or the much larger Scarlet Crusade, which protected the remaining civilian populations but was becoming more unhinged as the continent continued to fall into darkness.

Only a few days before, they had come across a handful of Crusaders while on a raid on a Scourge-run ruined village. While the humans had consented to join forces for the fight, they were by far the exception and not the rule. The paladins and priests in the higher ranks of the order had never really trusted mages, and she was from Dalaran after all, as well as a halfbreed.

It had been a successful raid. A Lich whose name she gratefully did not know was banished, a handful of necromancers and cultists were killed, and a horde of the undead had been burnt and finally put to rest without even one casualty on their side.

When not on a raid, her warband was based in a cave in one of the many chasms that could be found in the east of Lordaeron. The cave's entrance was wooded up, with a door they had built to allow entry, and camouflage around the front to make it invisible to the Scourge scouts.

There were a few ruined villages around the area, but they had been destroyed so long ago that there wouldn't be anything useful left there for them. The plants in Lordaeron had also all been poisoned, and with them went most of the animals, but there were a few left.

"Let's go for a hunt. Maybe we'll find in this light-forsaken land for us to eat."