Once, the world was different. Humans dominated the planet, transforming the ecosystem to suit their needs, extracting the planet's resources with abandon. Those days are long gone.
You may recall them, or you may not. You may have lived the bulk of your life long before global communication, television, even electric light or steam power. But whether your own place and time was filled with sprawling metropolitan cities or merely a few scattered agricultural settlements, it was not this.
At some point, you were taken. Not long ago, by your own recollection. Days, perhaps weeks, even mere hours ago. You, along with a great many others, found yourself, with no explanation, on the shores of a frozen island in an unfamiliar place. The people you've met, if you've met any, likely seem quite strange. They seem to disagree on the details, both large and small. Is the world as they know it the human-dominated landscape of global civilization? Is it a ruin of what once was, littered with infection and death? When did the Cold War end? What is the Internet? What is soap?
Gradually it begins to emerge that these others, snatched from their homes in the same flash of light that brought you here, are not simply out of their minds. They have been taken from across time, across space, and it seems even across probability.
The why of it is not immediately clear, though some speak of an old woman's voice, apologetic and interrupted by shifting static. Others speak of a struggle against a strange red mist in the world they came from, heralding an army of mutants and transforming the minds and bodies of those who linger too long within it.
Perhaps this is the reason for the strange tinge in the sky. The whiffs of an alien, acrid smell that sometimes finds its way to you on the chilled gusts of wind that catch your nose.
Perhaps you will find your own explanation in time. As well as an explanation for the maddened, ravenous things, no longer quite human, that pursue you relentlessly and fill the night with their beastial screams. Perhaps.
For the moment, though, you have more pressing concerns. It is cold, you are hungry, and rescue seems unlikely.
Welcome to Sakhal.