Lotus–a city built on the ruins of greatness. The shattered foundations and ruined towers of the glorious First Age city that lie beneath Lotus are the only things of grandeur or awe in the city, now an insignificant borough in the Easternmost outskirts of the Threshold. Where the glorious wonderworks of the First Age’s Solars once stood, there are now only fields of wheat and rice, the only ware of significance that Lotus has to offer up. So mean and small is the city’s populace that the Empire has long omitted it from maps, and even the local satrap can scarcely be bothered to mind its affairs (save to tax it), leaving rule of the city to its chief mandarin, an indolent, luxury-loving bureaucrat who knows neither iron fist nor velvet glove. Under his administration, the city has stagnated, never growing beyond a mere farming village.
All this is soon to change.
For this is a Time of Tumult, an era of rebirth and revolution. The Golden Host of the First Age is returned, the Solar Exalted once again striving to enforce their Creation-Ruling Mandate. Lotus lies like a pearl beneath muddy waters. The Scarlet Empire, already in disarray, would be slow in discovering the presence of the Lawgivers in Lotus, and it would be months before the Wyld Hunt could be dispatched. The chief mandarin rules the city by little more than loosely-enforced decree, and would be hard-pressed to defend his authority were it to be challenged by the returned Solar Exalted. And finally, in the catacombs and ruins beneath the city there slumber the relics and artifacts of the First Age, treasures with power to reshape Creation in the hands of their rightful wielders. The wind over Lotus is changing–the Lawgivers are coming. In time, Lotus will rise up as a golden metropolis, the seat of a new Solar Empire–or else fall beneath the awakened wrath of the Scarlet Empire.