Xen’s Garden
Host Plane: Abaddon
Before Annwyn was lost forever, it was a realm of untold wonder, where life did not simply grow but flourished beyond imagination. Watching over the Undying Plane, elvish demigods known as The Eldest nurtured a world where nature’s bounty knew no limits. But one among them, a gardener by the name of Xen—Eldest of the Fruitful Vine—lacked the compassion and foresight of her kin, seeing Annwyn’s plenitude not as a sacred trust, but as a canvas for unchecked creation.
Xen (pronounced either “Zen” or “Shen”) did not create for purpose: she created for creation’s sake, using her skills to sculpt a separate pocket realm beyond the reach of time. It was meant to be a sanctuary, a playground, a perfect garden, bound to Annwyn but untethered from its laws, where she could cultivate anything her imagination devised. She heeded no warnings. The other Eldest saw her folly, but Xen, intoxicated by her own artistry, sowed without thought of the harvest.
Then came the Syzygy. Annwyn vanished, and Xen along with it, leaving her garden severed from its creator. Untethered, it drifted through the Gap like a wayward seed, until it latched onto the plane below — Abaddon, a realm of death and entropy. Without Xen, who had been its gardener and winnower, the garden bloomed out of control, and its once-perfect ecosystem became a place of grotesque, wanton mutation. The delicate symmetry of its landscape warped, its creatures evolved without limit or restraint, birthing forms beautiful but dangerous, neither plant nor animal, constantly reshaping, reforming, consuming, and becoming.
Some scholars describe Xen’s Garden as a ruined paradise, but this is a misunderstanding of its nature. Ruin implies death, and nothing here dies as it should. Everything pulses with ceaseless, hungry transformation, not the rot or decay of Abaddon, but a state of perpetual, ever-escalating life, heedless of balance or mercy. Here, no form is final, and nothing is considered foreign because everything is foreign, even to itself. Most planar navigators who wander in emerge changed — reborn as something not entirely themselves. Others never emerge at all, claimed by a garden that no longer remembers what it was meant to be.
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