Feedback...feedback for the poor...(fantasy)

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So I was asleep the other night, minding my own business, and my brain decided that it was time to kick into overdrive. I had this really detailed, really intricate dream that made sense and had a plot... essentially a story. I've already written down the plot of the story from beginning to end, the main characters and everything--my biggest problem now is to start it out and to get the world across to the reader without being to longwinded. It *is* fantasy, and it *does* use fantasy/Tolkien based characters, but the world is completely made up, and how the races developed into what they are is completely made up--I didn't want to just rip dwarves out of LotR and use them for my own ends. Anyway, what I'm about to post is just the introduction, and I want to see what everybody thinks about the style and whether it pulls you in. I like criticism and I like praise, it all helps me immensely!

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The world ended. And sometimes that’s just when things begin.

The sun rose on another hot and dusty day. It crept over the rolling green hills and sparkled on the surface of the lakes, a slow tendril of light picking out a clearing here and there. The forest was waking with the sounds of early morning animals, and a few birds sang out their joy to the sun. At the edge of the forest lay a small town. The sun did not awaken this town, and no one sang their joy to the beginning of a new day there. True, the sun spread it’s ray there as it did everywhere else, but it was a merciless brightness that pleased no one—there was no one there to please. The town was dead.
A few minutes and a few miles away another group of buildings began to lighten with the new day. This was a larger town and had once even been a described as a bustling city, a land port where merchants came to drop off their wares. A small feral cat ran across an empty street, staying just ahead of the sun and hiding from no one. There was no one there to hide from. The city was dead.
The world had been turned over. The beasts of the forest had laid claim to all that used to be claimed by humans, and the morning sun shone on nothing more than ghost towns where even the bravest—and most desperate—animals refused to enter. Death had come to Uluther, and Death had been unkind.
Death, in this instance, had been a disease. It’s not worth describing the pain of the last year, the new prophets that had arisen to claim worship to a God that could save them, to watch as people lay down in the streets and died. There had been no strength left to die inside, and soon there had been no people left to move the decaying bodies from the streets. A year later the bodies lay where they had fallen, reduced to skeletons by the passing of time and the few unlucky animals that couldn’t smell disease on a dead body. It had spread like the plague, and killed like a knife to the heart—when the first people began to die their symptoms were varied and mostly harmless, a cough or a sneeze that had killed them. And how could a whole society prepare for a disease that didn’t scream as it came, but crept as silently as a very good assassin? By the time the people of Uluther had realized they were sick, they were doomed. Some of the lucky few had taken their fate into their own hands and committed suicide-most didn’t have the time. By the time their vision had become blurry, the lethargy was less than an hour away. Within 3 hours they were paralyzed—literally, as anyone who had seen the men and women laying about the street with no life but the tears in their eyes could attest to—and then there was the mercifully short period of pain. 10 minutes of the most mind-numbing, nerve-shattering pain, and then they were gone. The world was dead.