Winds of Ruin

The world is tired. Grass breaks through between the stones of civilization. Walls crumble, and lands long inhabited are home now to dust and wind and ghosts.

From the navel of the world, a great empire has ruled for six hundred years. The first emperors conquered east and west, built cities, claimed the world. Now the Golden Age has ended, and the empire rots in an Age of Madness.

At first this collapse was violent, but even the entropic force of civil war has steadily yielded to the exhaustion of the age. Each winter is colder and longer than the last, and ice creeps from the edges.

Yet despair is not total. Scholars speak of a cycle: the receding of the ice, the return of the wise kings. And at the edges, where life is most difficult, there may still be stories yet untold. 

Our story takes place at one such edge, a backwater called Freemarch.