The first whisper of Greenhurst came not with stone or steel, but with a single seed. A seed fallen from the Sky-Trees, colossal beings said to drink starlight and weep emerald dew. Legend holds that this seed landed in a valley untouched by time, where gravity itself seemed to bend to a different rhythm. This is where the village began – a tiny collection of dwellings woven into the roots of ancient, luminous fungi.
The inhabitants, known as the Verdants, possessed an uncanny connection to the land. They could coax blossoms from barren rock and command the flow of subterranean rivers. Their lives revolved around the pulse of the Heartwood, a massive, sentient tree at the valley’s center. The Heartwood wasn't merely providing shelter; it was *remembering*. It held within its rings the echoes of countless generations, the joys, sorrows, and forgotten rituals of the Verdants.
Cultivation of Lumiflora
The Rite of Echoes
Guardian Spirits of the Rivers
The Shadow-Beasts and the Obsidian Gate
For centuries, Greenhurst thrived, a beacon of verdant serenity. But this tranquility was shattered by the emergence of the Umbra – creatures born from forgotten nightmares and fueled by the valley’s dissonances. They were drawn to the Heartwood's memories, attempting to corrupt them and unravel the very fabric of Greenhurst.
The Verdants discovered that the source of the Umbra's power lay in a fissure – the Obsidian Gate - which opened sporadically beneath the valley floor. This gate wasn’t natural; it was a wound inflicted by a long-lost civilization, a people who had sought to harness the Heartwood's energy for their own destructive purposes. The gate pulsed with an unnatural darkness, feeding the Umbra and threatening to consume Greenhurst entirely.