Almost Eldritch
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In the times of our forefarmers, in the year One in the day Twenry-Ber. The first settlers of what would one day become the Great and Powerful City of Elra, Fatherland City of all Elrichians, stepped into history on this date, as they were recorded passing through the Grand and Ancient City-State of the Commerce Masters in Grandia. It is not known from whence they came, only that they sought a new land for living space.

It was in this city that we learn the most of our ancestors. Many of them were happy, simple men of simple tastes. They all hoped for a better future. They were also found to be totally unfamiliar with Vegetables, and the Grandian merchants were happy to sell specimens to them at marked cost. Most of these veggies and seeds were rotten to the core, with the exception of the Cabbages, which proved worthy.

Many of the Grandian inhabitants beseeched and warned them not to travel to the far East, lest they meet with a terrible fate. They spoke of an eldritch monster which ravaged any and all settlers who moved there, and left only the stragglers to return to Grandia for refuge. They implored upon these early Elrichians one request: if they were insistent on going and settling, the city inhabitants wished for them to die as a whole and not leave stragglers to further burden their economy.

Now, we do not know precisely the proto-language these Grandians and Elrichians spoke, but it was fraught with differences. The Elrichians had absolutely no idea what they were being warned about, and it is debatable as to whether they knew they were being warned, as records of the day say they left the city in high hopes of the frontier they set to settle upon.

They traveled for sixty days and thirty nights, until finally setting upon what is now Elrich's outermost province, the Teba swamps. Many a settler was lost to its mildly dangerous peat bogs and titanic tusked bullhogs. It is said that, out of mild inconvenience, some of the settlers were forced to occasionally use an out-of-the-way path in order to not cross into danger's path. Finally, from this great trial, they emerged to the hills and valleys of Elrich proper. But their journey was not done.

After a merry hike across these happy lands, they came to the body of water we now call Elra bay. After momentary setbacks involving the celebratory droppings of Sea Pidgeons, they made their camp. However, the warnings of Grandia were not vanities or falsehoods. After the first buildings were erected, a terrible creature emerged from the bay. It was the Legendary Hag Saphhire.

She stood at eleven feet tall, composed entirely of blue stone, witchcraft, and glue. Her long, pointed nose wart was in almost equal proportion to her nose, and the witches hat she wore upon her head was always waterlogged with dark intentions. A dark light shone throughout her crystal form, and her cackle tinkled deep into the night. The people of this unnamed Elra were defenseless. She only had to walk through their farms to destroy them.

The squashes stood no chance. Eggplants were toast. Peaches, while not vegetables in a traditional sense, fared no better as the Hag Sapphire stomped through their entire earthworks, dooming the settlers to famine and disease and other unpleasantness even if they were able to resist her power, which was growing with every step.

For you see, the seeds sold to them in Grandia were among the most evil ever encompassed in a crop, rotten to the core and bad to the seed. As she stomped through them, their dark powers corrupted her, making her more and more evil and powerful, but unstable. The Hag Sapphire saw this, and was glad, for it gave her power enough to leave her bay and wreak panic and havoc on the world.

Finally, she reached the Cabbages. These cabbages, although a small patch, were the only good to be found in this newfounded town. Expecting a new influx on her evil powers, the Hag Sapphire stomped upon one, only for the power of good and love to course through her. The Hag Sapphire, confused by her new-found and intense feelings for the plants she had destroyed, began to weep, and as she fell upon the patch, the influx of good into her unstable, evil body rendered it to pieces, and she was destroyed.

The winter was hard for Elra, as it came to be known, but the Cabbage patch fed them through the hard nights and into Spring. The people of Elra never forgot their vegetablian patriarchs, nor those who had warned them of the danger and given them the seeds of victory. Their warnings came to give a name to the new land. So, it became Elrich.

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