The Contrarium

For every Thing in this realm there is certainly some Other Thing, I think, and just as there are Places filled with many Things, there must surely be Other Places filled with Other Things - T. Aeschelon, 1st Century member of the Infinite Symposium. Probable Crackpot.

While the early Philosopher Aeschelon has been widely discredited across the land of Oud Vhar, his legacy does remain with us in the use of the informal name given to one of the terrors of Titan Vale. Aeschelon believed that all matter in the world was twinned with an Alter, or Other. While many of these Alter forms were believed to reside in other planes of existence, the Philosopher also theorised that some Alter forms would find their way into our plane. From this, he supposed the idea of the Contrarium, that is, a place in this world where Alter forms tended to congregate, much as people and animals and buildings tend to cluster together in particular places.

It is unknown how the minor terror in question came to be called The Contrarium, but one could suppose that someone who knew of the work of Aeschelon and also happened to witness some aspect of the Terror chose to coin the term, due to some similarity between the two. To understand what a practical Contrarium might look like, we can turn to statements from Symposium 99812

"To imagine it in the physical world? Well, as I have said, it's only a theory. It might be simplest to think of it as an ambigram made material... (transcript missing)... in that place things would look the same, but at once they would not. And perhaps the Alter-things would have opposite goals, opposite needs, to the Things that they reflected in the material world..."

The location of The Contrarium is unknown, but Linus, writing on Cooley, theorised that such a thing would be located somewhere in the vast subterra below Titan Vale, given that there is no physical evidence of it in the world above.