Girasol

Girasol was an old world long before the Horavir, the time of men. Girasol was once little more than a bare spore drifting through the celestial wind, but soon fell in love with the sun, Heliantha, and the moon, Ipomoea. In this Horamor, the time of love, the elves first grew from the surface of Girasol. They began to break down the raw minerals and material left from the Antehora, the time of drifting, and free up energy and space for other life to take root. Though they never left, the elves were soon overshadowed by the beings now revered as divine, the great [Plant Gods]. The [Angeiophytes?] began to rule over their time of blossoming, the Horaflur, and it is at the penultimate cusp of this most recent age that we come to tell our story.   Girasol is on the precipice of great change. On the fertile grasslands in the far east, a kingdom of men is rapidly growing. Microsia, an empire built from the rubble of the old city of Micros by its new king, Paolo Trástaleon, is consolidating power and blighting the land with its strange mechanisms and machinations. King Trástaleon fancies himself the rightful heir to all of Girasol and progenitor of a prosperous time to come in the Horavir. He has constructed strange machines said to think like humans and to see like gods, which he is rumored to consult and consort with in the late hours of the night, plotting. Some have even begun to question who is leading whom.   Coinciding with the rise of Microsia is the spread of a malicious Blight upon the land. No one is quite sure where it comes from or how or why, but they have little reason to doubt its spread is related to the growth of empire. Locals in some places have even taken to referring to the spread of Microsia's imperial reach as a "blight" which only serves to muddy the waters further on where this awful force originates. While Microsia openly states that it does not seek to harm, but only to optimize, to maximize the efficiency and production and qualities of its subjects, the Blight leaves naught but corruption in its wake. Worse still, the Blight often seems to find its way in to places on the edges of the Microsian borders, slowly seeping in to the frontier towns on either side until they are too weak to withstand Trástaleon's might. There are even rumors the Blight has begun to violate gods.   Most recently, the blight set upon a town called Schnifflestein, a quaint market city on the eastern coast of the continent of Arbora. Strangely, no records seem to exist of Schnifflestein in any contemporary place; it seems as though it just... materialized out of thin air. Schnifflestein was reduced to sludge and rubble, its inhabitants who were lucky enough to survive fleeing either into the mysterious woods to the west or down into the old tunnels beneath the city. Many perished. Microsia is sure to be close behind.