Arcadia (ar-KAY-dee-a)

Hex-Orchards and Meridian Roads

Arcadia’s fields are planted in hexagonal orchards that align to stone meridians. The grid isn’t sterile; it’s legible, bee-lines, windbreaks, and irrigation all read like kindly geometry. Milestones (waist-high pillars) mark distance and civic promises; touch one to feel the last vow sworn there as a warm pulse.  

The Just Rivers

Blue-green waters keep their own records. Drop a signed token and the river will carry it to the right mill or harbor by the next toll-hour. Those who dump refuse without permit find their cargo re-delivered to their doorstep at dawn, neatly stacked and itemized.  

Concord Groves

Stands of living oak where agreements are witnessed. Each tree bears leaf-veins like script; when a pact is kept, that year’s ring gleams faintly. Breaking guest-right within sight of a Concord Grove turns its leaves ash-gray until reparations are made.  

Star-Pastures

By night the grass glints with aether motes; constellations pulse brighter over communities that met their tallies. Travelers can literally navigate by kept promise.  

The Layers

Abellio

This layer is an endless stretch of orderly plains, clean rivers, and measured hills, with a handful of solemn mountains rising like milestones. It is Arcadia most plainly seen, a landscape where roads meet at right angles, orchards are pruned to music, and petitions are resolved as readily as harvests are brought in. Here also stand the bastions of the righteous: among them the redoubt of Angradd, a mountain-fortress near the plane’s loftiest heights, said to be vast enough to shelter every dwarf of the Prime should the need ever come.  

Buxenus

Buxenus carries the hush of libraries and the hum of well-tuned laboratories. It is the seat of Sophis. Scripted avenues and rune-lit cloisters guide scholars and battle-mages alike; here, power is cataloged, tested, and taught, with a reverence that feels like prayer.  

Inhabitants

Arcadia’s fauna are Prime in form yet unmistakably otherworldly: rabbits with copper coats, golden foxes, sheep whose wool shines silver. Their eyes are white, without iris or pupil, and they see clean through glamers; they are peaceful, native to the Outer Planes, and unmoved by magics meant for mortal beasts, though they can be trained into impeccable watch-creatures. Hive-thinkers, ants, bees, wasps, thrive here too, their colonies modeling Arcadia’s tidy commonwealths.   The plane’s foremost citizens are the Acherons and spirit legions: disciplined hosts raised from the souls of good, lawful warriors, Arcadia’s measured answer to Acheron’s iron tides. Alongside them stride hollyphants, planetars, foo creatures, and devas; visitors from neighboring heavens, shedu, lammasu great and small, and ki-rin, are a familiar sight at the trellis gates. (It is said even the most resolute wardens of other planes feel a homeward tug on Arcadia’s greens.)

At Arcadia’s highest peak rests the Orb of Day and Night, a perfect sphere whose halves glow and dim in steady turn. There is no dawn or dusk in Arcadia, only the sure switch between light and night as the Orb rotates, bathing half the infinite realm in day while the other half stands in star-pricked dark. Life keeps cadence with its rotation: watches begin on the bell of the brightening edge, conclaves adjourn when the shadow takes their steps.

At each toll-hour (six times daily) Arcadia resolves certain ongoing effects: status and sanctuary refresh, communal boons (below) reset, and some curses abate if restitution has been made.   Arcadia is not a place of blind obedience but of kept promises. Plans flourish; schedules are a kind of hymn. A well-laid garden prospers; a fair law finds eager hands. Those who arrive with order in their hearts, wardens, judges, quartermasters, healers with neat ledgers, work as if the plane itself were lending tools. The merely tyrannical discover no purchase here: compulsion without consent rings hollow against Arcadia’s stone, and cruelty finds itself politely, firmly refused.