The city of Smorgengrog was filled with the pitter patter of people and the rickety clatter of wood carts amongst the cobblestone roads. Vendors were out and about, shilling their wares in front of their stalls. All manner of bright colored fruits, hand crafted merchandise, cooked goods, and all kinds if oddities were for sale. The blazing sun was high above in a cloudless sky, and a light breeze wafted through the summer air. And idyllic day to be sure, but deep deep below the streets, under the maze of sewers and below the catacombs, the light only came from the soft yellow glow of torches and the occasional ray of sunbeam through small cracks in the subsurface. This subterranean amalgamation of sprawling poorly crafted wood structure and construction was home to our rat men friends.
Skrak was busy chipping away with his cleaver on a mound of flesh. The rat man was dressed in a butcher's smock as he chipped and copped away. Clop clop clop. The blood spurted and squirt onto his apron with every swing of the blade. His whiskers scrunched as the aroma of decaying flesh coated the air in a thick miasma. He had noticed a clear uptick in the amount of his fellow fallen brethren that came across his table. As he finished chunking the meat into small bite sized pieces, he slid the pile of unidentifiable flesh into a boiling cauldron. A brown scum collected atop the water between the plopping liquid. This was to be a communal offering to the rest of the rat colony, daily subsistence. Skrak was the chef, the cook, however in this society, with little to go around other than what could be stolen in the dead of night from the world above, was the meat of their own which was in abundance. His one and only job was to parcel out the meat, strip it from the bone, the fur having already been stripped and purposed out higher up in the production chain. Today though, today was going to be different as a knock on his door rang through the room. Usually, visitors were rare, most came through a chute in the ceiling into awaiting wheelbarrows, and of course they'd already been long dead and processed.
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"What? Who is it? busy busy I am!" Skrak said in a chittering voice.
"Come follow, we need to go now haste!" Said the voice from beyond the door in a hurried tone.
"Why? Food here, needs to cook, stew, boil, overseer won't be happy, then I will be the food, supper!" Skrak said, not missing a beat in his work as he drew his cleaver down into the flesh with a crack of bone ringing out.
"No no, must leave, NOW! Run away!" Said the voice before it could before the sound of their rat paws hitting the floorboards disappeared in a hurry.
Suddenly, a grinding sound was heard, and the room started to shake. Skrak ran to the door as the shaking became more and more intense. "A ground shake quake?" He exclaimed as he flung the door open. He ran outside just as the grinding stopped. A distant muffled voice rang out "Contact!" followed by the sound of a buzz. Before he knew what had hit him, BOOM, an explosion of terrible might sent him reeling and the little wooden structure that was his workplace tumbling down to the ground. He was sent flying clear across a courtyard as other buildings of similar construction to his also came crumbling down in flame and destruction. Blood filled his nose along with the scent of sulfur, in his sharp ears was a painful ringing. Half buried under a pile of debris, he stared out in a daze, his vision fading as unstable slabs of rock and stone started coming down one by one. In the chaos and cloud of ash and smoke, he could see across where there had once been sheer rock was a massive hole. He could do nothing more than stare as a figure just about his height, except wide and bulkier appeared before the light from his red beady eyes disappeared completely, and everything went to nothing.