Arbre

Overview

Arbre is the inhabited world on which avout live within the Mathic World and others live extramuros beyond the walls. The name anchors formal dating in the A.R. era. Accounts describe long-term climatic swings and migrations after the Terrible Events, with communities adapting to arid basins, irrigated valleys, and mountain terraces.

Notable Features

• Skywatching infrastructure: many maths maintain roofline observatories such as the Starhenge; orreries commonly include a lapis sphere representing Arbre.
• Sæcular networks: paved highways, freight traffic, and a navigation-satellite system used by cartablas. Reports note that portions of the road network outside major towns can be rough or degraded and that, on a recent morning, devices across a wide region failed to obtain fixes (cause unconfirmed).
• Local standard: everyday speech treats Arbre’s surface gravity as the baseline “one-gee” reference when estimating spin-gravity for rotating habitats and vehicles.
• Terrain and land use: lower mountain slopes in some regions support fuel-tree plantations served by dirt logging roads and heavy trucks; higher elevations open into wild country with tarns, old tracks, and disused structures such as abandoned fortresses and cabins. These areas are sparsely settled and used seasonally for hunting and camping.

Associations

• Calendrical and institutional: Arbre’s cycles frame observance in the A.R. system and the mathic calendar.
• Cultural landmarks: references to the “Three Inviolates” commonly point to maths at the Concent of Saunt Edhar, Saunt Rambalf’s math, and the Concent of Saunt Tredegarh.

Recent Activity

• Orbital object: ground and instrument observers describe an icosahedral object in Arbre-centered orbit. Features noted include a network of edge members meeting at rounded vertices and, on at least one face, markings laid out as a geometric construction akin to a proof. A separate inscription on a forward strut uses characters resembling, but not identical to, familiar alphabets. Within avout circles, some have begun calling the presumed visitors the “Cousins.”
• Narrow-beam illumination: on at least one night, a red beam from the object illuminated prominent maths; examples shown publicly included Saunt Rambalf’s and Saunt Tredegarh’s. In dialog among travelers, a Thousander reports that long-term waste repositories exist beneath Edhar’s crag, with similar sites at Rambalf and Tredegarh; others treat this as sensitive and not publicly confirmed.
• Systems effects: contemporaneous reports also mentioned a navigation-satellite outage; explanations circulating range from festival interference to deliberate disruption, none verified.
• Planetary sentiment: travelers describe a surge of world-level identification and concern—speaking of feeling like “citizens of the world”—in response to the orbital craft’s appearance; some invoke laments for the Third Sack when imagining worst-case outcomes.

Status/Access

Arbre is active and inhabited across both cloistered concents and the Sæculum. Travel conditions vary widely by region and era of maintenance, from well-kept highways to broken “new gravel” stretches in the countryside. Observational access to the sky continues through instruments wherever permitted; information about the orbital object is being compiled from both public images and private measurements. In remote highlands, hand devices such as jeejahs may have thin connectivity and navigation tools may struggle to acquire fixes.