The Symmetry Gardens
The Symmetry Gardens is the collective name for a group of small areas in the Odz province of the Anglic Unison, all of which host a sliver of the Plane of Order.
In these lands, events happening in a place will happen soon after in a corresponding location, following a specific isometric pattern. Plants grow symmetrical to a point, animals nest in specular locations, and even random events “reflect” or “translate”: for example, if a bolt of lightning strikes a tree, another one will hit another tree at the same distance from the invisible forest “axis”. The symmetric effect is unprecise and not instantaneous but it’s pervasive and possibly inevitable. If you walk a path you can be assured someone will travel a corresponding path soon after, or, maybe, they have traveled it just before. If you lose a coin near a creek then someone has lost a coin in a very similar place, or they will in a matter of time.
The Symmetry Gardens are all inhabited: some are groves, woodlands, or forests. Others, the smaller ones, are tended as gardens (hence the name), but nobody lives on the premises. Anyone who spends more than a day or two in such places reports feelings of oppression and impending doom. Scholars believe this is the sensation caused by the loss of free will: the shards of Order are an “entropy dampener” that limits the range of what’s possible. The only people tolerating and even enjoying this existential weirdness are the Kheperis. The scarab people see the world as overlapping probabilities, a cloud of possible immediate futures. What this entails is unclear, but they often use this example to try to make people understand. Imagine you are blindfolded and told to go around an unknown room. On your first try, you’ll bump into something, the second time you feel some furniture, the tenth you start to have a decent picture of your surroundings. For a Kepheri, entering a room is like already having done hundreds of these explorations in advance. They see an image generated by everything they could do in the next five seconds or so, or at least the more probable. “See” is a crude approximation of what they sense, they don’t have eyes after all, but the kephris say it’s close enough. The limited possibilities of the Symmetry Gardens are therefore a relief for the sense of the Keperi: if fewer things are possible their “vision” is clearer, less noisy.
There are many towns and villages near the shards of Order, especially near smaller ones that can be tended as actual gardens. These settlements have significant Kepheri communities but host humans and other species alike. Outside the perimeters, the Gardens’ influence is subtle, but sometimes strange things happen, like wine stains being perfectly symmetrical, or tripping on a pothole to see that someone has tripped as well, on the other side of the street at the same time. It is a common stereotype that the people here are more beautiful thanks to nice symmetric features.
Shikef, the biggest city in the region, has one of the biggest and most curated gardens. Here, scholars have tried to understand the workings of the shards of Order and attempted to harness their probability-bending field. For centuries, nobody has succeded. It’s impossible to predict how the symmetry will be upheld and when: if I plant a flower in a corner of the garden I can not say in advance if another flower will grow in the corresponding place or if the first flower will die. In the same way, I can break the symmetry for a while, but eventually, maybe even after months, events will conspire to restore it: I may put a dog in a cage in a spot and put guards to keep all dogs away from the corresponding point, but through a series of seemingly impossible coincidences either the first dog will escape or a dog will appear in the other spot. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the Garden, seen as the perfect place to test some of the more modern magic theories, like the existence of invisible mana or other spatial layers. No breakthrough has been announced, at the moment.
Shikef is one of the handful of places in Axam with a Matras embassy. The Constructs of the True Order feel that it’s their ancestral duty to preserve the remains of the plane of Order and, in the Accord after the Cosmic War, they have demanded an outpost near all of them. The presence of the Matras has caused in the past tensions, depending on the politics of the times, but it has also been a resource since it’s one of the few direct lines of communication with the elusive Uxalian people. It must said that Matras rival Kepheri in enigmatic posture and indecipherable behaviour, doing things following an opaque logic. These two people are on good terms and it’s not uncommon to see a scarab person and a living construct walk side by side in the Shikaf’s Garden, speaking of something nobody else can wrap their head around.
