Later that night in the student apartment.

Done with Saana for another day, a shirtless Henry was exercising to burn off some of his pent-up energy before sleep. Presently, he was ducking through the nocturnal quiet of the lounge, blocking the shadows using the latest techniques imparted to him by his Digital twin, pausing on occasion when the confined space of his environment limited his range of movement. From his frantic retreating, he seemed to be losing for a moment. Then, he wasn't. Henry abruptly broke out with a sequence of six nudges, his elbows and palms striking with a mechanical quality reminiscent of a Rubik’s cube cranking through the last twists. His shadow foe falling into place, he caught an invisible sword with one raised arm, while the hand of the other arm, extended forward at a strange angle, clasped a pocket of air and squeezed. Delivering the coup de gra—

Bzzt.

His e-assistant pulled him out of his trance.

Moving over to a couch, he retrieved a VR helmet. As he donned the device over his head and fixed it into place, it began to hum, a slight pressure rising inside his head with the onset of a scan to check the integrity of his brain.

Hannes’s voice echoed in his ears.

'Henry buddy, you’re not going to try to squeeze me for the information?’

‘Pointless,’ he replied.

His Digital twin had considered trying to trick Hannes into accidentally giving up spoilers on Karnon by analysing habitual responses to surprise statements, but vocal communication alone conveyed insufficient information.

'Haha. That is very sneaky. Well, buddy, I can see that your brain is in a functioning condition. A bit of stress damage, but nothing a visit to the sauna and a few days of sleep can’t correct. Of course, if you were to sign up for Project Vat Brain, you wouldn’t need to sleep ever again. We could keep replacing—'

'Nope.'

‘There’s no danger - we’d grow plenty of back-up brains.’

‘Nah, mate, even I have my limits. Digital replications are enough. I'm not becoming a brain in a vat on account of your trash game.'

'Sure? The vats are much cosier than a cranium.'

'I'm not interested.'

Hannes sighed despondently. ‘Peaceloveharmony isn't either…’

Following the brain scan, Henry took a bath to clean off the grime and relax his muscles. Then, he lay out a futon on the lounge floor, unable as he was to sleep near Alex’s kid due to his night terrors.

His head resting on a firm pillow, he stared at the apartment ceiling, and he willed his eyelids to become heavy. Again and again, he reminded himself that the events keeping him awake, despite the many strange angles one might observe them from, were ultimately still taking place inside of a videogame. Suchi, The Trickster God, The Cycle - these were mere digital fictions.

It was just a game...it was just a game...it WAS just a game...

And, really, that might be the most accurate lens through which to evaluate Karnon, as a character in a game, a character beholden to the contrived dynamics of Saana’s ‘Cycle’, an invention of its manipulations.

And what exactly was The Cycle?

Listening to Saana’s inhabitants, one would encounter a variety of conflicting explanations. The Ibangua of Suchi, with their blood-mythos, described The Cycle as humankind undergoing a series of embedded annihilations and rebirths across different timescales, reborn from the blood-soaked clay, reborn from the blood-consuming sands of the desert. According to The All-Mother’s religion of Cyclic Assignation, souls were channelled through a cyclical train of Duties across successive lifetimes, culminating in a final Ascendance to the Cosmos. The inhabitants of Manger, whom Karnon had parodied with his mimicry of his wife, spoke of a Cyclical Dialectic in which individuals resided within a recurring repetition of clashing roles like ‘The Hero’ or ‘The Enemy-Bear’. Every society had a unique theory for this mysterious phenomenon.

If you were to ask Henry, however, he would respond that The Cycle was the trash game itself. The Cycle was Saana’s—the game’s—computational systems operating in the background to rebalance the world’s dynamics away from the boring conditions of real-life to something fun for players to game inside of.

At even a superficial glance, it was apparent that the universe of Saana was abnormal. Cultures were much more divergent and varied, natural resources had a balanced distribution across Starting Zones, challenges facing players were graduated so that end-game adversaries didn’t appear before they were ready, etc. These aberrancies couldn't be explained by simple game mechanics like the existence of magic alone. There had to be deeper forces arranging the world.

Henry’d first figured out the precise nature of The Cycle back in Saana II. After quitting the guild once they'd conquered the globe, he'd secretly resumed his Cripple duelling antics for fun, challenging gods and demons to 1v1s, taking out the hidden bad guys. This had been a mistake. He'd soon found himself locked in a perplexing treadmill of increasingly numerous and powerful enemies, who quickly escalated to such a level that his refusal to kill them would have destroyed the entire planet, a conclusion that his growing sentimental attachments made him somewhat averse to. When he’d complained to Hannes to stop throwing baddies at him so he could quit, Saanatek’s lead developer had shrugged helplessly. Saana was mostly automated, the small Finnish development team setting only the initial parameters while the supercomputing rations that Technocommunist European players gave in exchange to play performed the bulk of the labour. Hannes himself, having only designed Saana to acquire data and extra supercomputing rations for his neurology research, barely touched the game. The indifferent developer had refused to explain what the system's parameters were due to his company’s policy of player impartiality. So Henry'd reverse engineered them.

He managed to identify the two predominant mechanisms by which the game system i.e. The Cycle enacted its manipulations. First and most obvious were higher Cosmic deities under explicit rules, like those handed down to the Zone Guardians forcing them to defend their protectorates. Second, more complicated, was a passive process without any personality that generated an increasing number of opportunities for both success and failure around a person as they grew stronger – e.g., inserting more talented souls into local NPC children, giving positive genetic mutations to crops and monsters, crystallising more valuable gemstones. If the individual facing these opportunities made the correct choice, they would grow stronger. If they chose incorrectly or missed them, those opportunities would be seized by their competitors. Eventually, as one's power grew too high, the number of opportunities became unmanageable, enemies capitalising on them whacked you, and everything you’d built would be stolen or destroyed. This was the treadmill of villains that Henry'd found himself stuck on, each of his victories attracting another set of challengers.

At a technical level, he believed the assignment of these opportunities was governed by an intra-Planar space wherein Saana’s various types of magical resources—Universal Productivity used in crafting or the Magical Energies used in combat—all reduced down to a single, primordial element. Wherever this primordial element pooled, much like matter warping spacetime, the adjacent Planar localities were impacted to generate the aberrancies that begot opportunities. More of the element present equalled more opportunities. He initially labelled this primordial element ‘Cheat-Substance’ - his first interaction with it had been in his analysis to scry out the probable locations of Legendary items, the cheat artefacts gravitating towards regions which he’d retroactively deduced contained high ‘Cheat-Substance’ density. Today, because he was no longer a thirteen-year-old, he called it ‘World-Substance’ – the substance governing the world (of Saana, the videogame).

Curiously, the accumulation of this World-Substance corresponded to a high degree with The Laughing Man and later Karnon’s conception of enlargening souls. The quantity of World-Substance and their resulting opportunity-aberrancies didn’t correlate merely to one's personal strength. It also rose in accordance with the power of supporters, the number of conflicts engaged in, the magical actions performed. Each action and reaction accrued some of it, and more essential than the action being good or evil, mere flavours, was its magnitude - extreme, evocative actions collecting greater amounts of World-Substance. Later, during Henry's search for The Cap, he discovered from past owners of The Ring of A Thousand Souls that the World-Substance seemed to be bound to the game-world’s souls. Prior ring owners, like himself, tended to split their organisations across souls for anonymity’s sake. A by-product of this division was that the number of Cycle-produced aberrancies that harassed them was reduced relative to what should be expected for their power - as it’d turned out, The Cycle evaluated each fabricated soul as distinct, each a potential enemy unto themselves, and therefore assigned the sum of them less World-Substance. So Karnon and his adopted father, in their genius and madness, had glimpsed a genuine aspect of their reality: their universe was truly indifferent to pleasure or pain, concerned only with the 'size' of things, of the 'soul'.

The cultural views of The Cycle from Saana’s other inhabitants similarly brushed upon different aspects of the game design, the NPCs articulating the observable anomalies of their universe and rationalising them through mythology.

The Ibangua mythos of civilisation getting annihilated and reborn accurately captured a societal instability created by The Cycle. The societies of the real world, Earth, were fairly stable. Periods of rapid regression and progression occurred, including the present digital age, but, on the total scale of human history, these were mere punctuations in long stretches of staticness, the adaptations invoked by technological advances eventually settling around an equilibrium. Most people to have ever lived have done so in a near-identical societal configuration to their great-great-great-grandparents. Change was an exception. In a videogame, though, change had to be the rule. To stay engaged, players needed constant disruption and challenge; craftsmen wanted new metals to forge and generals wanted new armies to smash. To sate the demand for novelty across hundreds of millions of players, Saana had to be maintained in an eternal state of upheaval and decline. Historically, within the span of six millennia, the planet had vacillated back and forth three-times between periods of total global connection and prosperity and numerous deities, and periods of fracture and darkness, where everyone was reduced to scattered farming settlements. Peak one had been around the time of The Redeemer, peak two with The All-Mother, and peak three would be in a few years when the ‘Offworlders’ were all zooming through the skies exchanging nuke-lasers. Within these larger cycles were multiple smaller rises and falls. These three larger cycles themselves fit within an even more dramatic cycle on the span of tens of millennia between game instalments, where civilisation vacillated between primitive hunter-gathering and interplanetary exploration. Saana was in a constant, schizophrenic state of transition - invoked, in the background, by the overall World-Substance pulsing, advancing and retreating like a cosmic tide.

Likewise, The All-Mother, in her Cyclic Assignation theory of destined Duties, had touched upon another, terrifying quality of The Cycle: predestination - or partial pre-destination. Henry, researching the background of his Saana II enemies, had discovered that several had begun the chain of events that led to their fatal conflict with him around the time when he’d first logged into the game, when his freakish existence had been registered by Saana’s game system. Therefore, there had to be an anticipatory mechanic in The Cycle predicting how far entities could climb. A constant dance was being performed to lay breadcrumb trails that produced the meeting of allies and enemies in a sensible order that neither brought the challenge prematurely nor late. The arrangement wasn't perfect - especially when the game-universe stopped being the pure simulation between instalments and welcomed players back in to try breaking it. Nevertheless, considering the scale of Saana, the pre-destination was pretty darn accurate. From this observation, Henry'd concluded that the World-Substance was, within the context of the game-universe, a timeless material and, in actuality, the anticipatory coordination of opportunistic anomalies by predictive supercomputing. Saana was a testament to the awe-inspiring might of modern technology.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The Mangerish conception of a Cyclic Dialectic also had its truth. What is an RPG without a villain? The Cycle manipulated special individuals into varied roles that clashed, created good and bad guys with divergent backstories and specialities that posed the players who would one day kill them with a novel, exciting battle.

The inhabitants of Saana had all captured a piece of The Cycle a.k.a. the game, but they’d never quite puzzled everything together. Unlike Henry, they didn’t have the key clue of knowing theirs was a constructed universe purpose-built for players to have fun, and the game system censored any attempt to divulge such meta-knowledge to prevent hitting the NPCs with existential horror.

Henry’s first rodeo in Saana II had finished with that realisation. Having reverse engineered The Cycle, he recognised the methods by which it’d trapped him in a perpetual battle. Digging deeper, he recognised how these same manipulative forces had moulded him into a ‘Tyrant’ that’d toppled the established regimes and had the audacity to build his own upon their ruins in ignorance of the same awaiting fate. To a small degree, as much as someone as young and dumb as himself back then could care, he recognised through his investigations the wider repercussions of the childish games he'd been playing. Henry's presence had killed an appalling number of NPCs. Freeing himself from The Cycle, he grabbed a Legendary Class to terminate his character’s invincibility, travelled to a remote galaxy on a distant Plane, and leapt into a black-hole, destroying himself and the negative World-Substance karma he’d amassed.

That was The Cycle, the game.

Returning to Karnon and himself in Saana III, of all the analyses Henry’d conducted on The Trickster God—dissecting the various threads of motivation like Pious Mischief, Anti-Colonialism, Humanitarianism, and the three’s demented lovechild Soul Expansionism—resorting to the much simpler perspective of Karnon as a character in a game might be the most revelatory. One might disregard the specifics of the deity’s personal history and re-assess him purely as a constructed agent of The Cycle, the game. His designed task: to oppose another game-character, The All-Mother. The Rangbitan hermaphrodite Goddess, attempting to subordinate the globe under her parental umbrella, was a personification of The Cycle’s unstable inclination to order, to unite and rise. The Trickster God was the counter-force, a personification of the unstable inclination to chaos, to break apart and fall.

All the events in The Trickster God’s chronology might be reinterpreted as mere setups for this singular conflict. Adopted into The Laughing Sons, Karnon was trained in the tactics of The Laughing Man, a genius of war, subterfuge, and terrorism, a figure who might himself have been The All-Mother’s Cycle-destined killer had he not been supplanted by his adopted child. In the Age of Wine, Karnon built a humanistic attachment to his homeland. This sentiment, after The Maelstrom fractured Togavi, gave him the motivation to conduct his greatest technical feat: developing teleportation magic for emergency mobility. The invasion from his neighbours and his retaliatory massacres set him on the course for his mind to break, for him to devolve into a deranged agent of Soul-Expansion in opposition to all forms of order and sensibility. And the resulting conniving, teleporting sower of laughter and suffering ended up being the lethal counter to The All-Mother, the final Cycle-assigned hurdle that she failed to jump on her climb to the Cosmos. And after her death, the peak she’d represented in The Cycle came to a close. The world’s polities began to fracture, Saana falling to the present trough, from which the soon-to-arrive ‘Offworlders’ could have fun rebuilding it.

Karnon’s saga should have concluded there, too. By killing the strongest deity on the planet, he should have proceeded to either get consumed by an even stronger game-character sent to him or Ascended to the Cosmos, escaping The Cycle. However, perhaps in the God’s madness, in the imperfection of his design, the motivation by which he’d killed his adversary, this ludicrous mission to expand souls, did not motivate him to seize her dominion. Consequently, he also didn't seize the burden of her World-Substance. Staying the God of small, impoverished Togavi, he inadvertently kept himself out of The Cycle’s pernicious sights by continuing to fart around pranking people. Thus, he receded from the spotlight of history, becoming a persistent, background nuisance on the likes of natural disasters. As there were plagues and earthquakes, there was Karnon.

So, if Karnon, this character in Saana the videogame, was an agent of The Cycle’s, a.k.a. the game’s, unstable inclination to chaos, then no ambiguity existed about the identity of his enemy in Suchi. It was Henry, who was fighting against The Cycle to build Saana into an ordered, less hellish place, to minimise the catastrophic influence of players like himself.

Henry, before this encounter with The Trickster God, had been foolish enough to believe he might've gotten away with it. Taking all his lessons from the previous instalment, he’d exercised extreme precaution in Saana III to minimise his 'World-Substance' footprint and avoid The Cycle's endless attempts at annihilation. He’d kept his character weak by never picking a Martial Class. He’d intentionally given his guild and their domains a wide, flat distribution of power. He’d refrained from utilising the many Legendaries he’d found, stowing them where they should be harmless. His most valuable tool had been his rusty, soul-storing ring. Since its spoofed souls were considered independent according to The Cycle, the factions under his control—The Company, his island-kingdom of Chayoka, his network of NPC successors, and Flaming Sun under Alex—each assigned to a different soul (or actual person), were judged as independent, united for now but always, by the game’s calculations, capable of opposition. This’d been the purpose of their elaborate fake separation. By the metrics of The Cycle, or the game, The Attention East-Saana Trading Company was a loose guild of sailor merchants operating out of a diffuse network of trading posts; for protection, these merchants hired mercenaries from an island called Chayoka; the goods and services these merchants sold weren’t manufactured by themselves but a third-party player-run business, Flaming Sun. They were merely middlemen. Of course, in actuality, The Company was a globe-spanning empire, whose ‘Trading Posts’ were, in fact, military bases, ready to reveal their main function at the drop of a hat or the theft of a sword. But the game system assigned Henry’s ‘guild’ challenges befitting only the first, much humbler position, and, by drawing on the ‘external’ assistance of their ‘allies’, The Company handled these easily. Henry’d won. Two years into this five-year instalment, he’d already beaten The Cycle a.k.a. the game, overcoming its capriciousness to establish a stable state of peace. The only challenges left were a couple malevolent deities to assassinate once the average player-level had risen enough to make this feasible and, when this instalment concluded, the final transition as the ‘Offworlders’ had to depart from this phase of ‘The Cycle’.

Henry should have won. The false division of his guild's components should, technically, have saved him from The Trickster God. By The Cycle’s calculations, The Company should not have been attacked by a menace of Karnon’s magnitude for several years. But then, technically, The Cycle should have rid the universe of Karnon a millennia ago. Karnon was an anomaly. A strange gap had been left between the game and this character created by the game. Like a son to a father, Karnon may have been moulded by The Cycle’s whims, but he wasn’t entirely constrained by them. While The Cycle might under-rate Henry’s guild, Karnon could put the obvious pieces together within his own mind, could accurately size them up, and then, abiding by the psychological aversion to order bestowed upon him by The Cycle through his Soul-Expansionism, decide to ‘prank’ them to death as he had countless others before.

But that same gap, the possible cause of their annihilation, might just be where their salvation lay.

One strand of Henry’s countless analyses had revolved around a single important question: what if The Trickster God had figured out The Cycle a.k.a. the game, too?

It was possible. Karnon may have been madder than himself, but he was also smarter. The God’s deranged notion of Soul-Expansionism already touched eerily close upon the World-Substance. Recent oddities may have been the last step he needed. Five centuries before the present day, Karnon along with the other Gods had suddenly been contacted by a Cosmic deity nominating them as 'Zone Guardians' and assigning them strict rules of conduct. Subsequently, a bunch of 'Offworlders' appeared, these aliens who resemble the locals but are immortal and behave like hyperactive children at a theme park Karnon and his peers had been assigned to monitor. That may have been enough. Karnon, too, may have finally recognised that his universe had been designed - and not for himself or any of his kind. He may have recognised the deeper influences shaping him to become a mad agent of chaos, to become the 'Trickster God’, a tragic hero devolved into a clown who titillates the player-base with his zany death-pranks. And he may have recognised the identical recognition in The Tyrant, who, trying to make amends for his own deranged past, had painstakingly crafted his second empire around the avoidance of The Cycle's a.k.a. the trash game’s insidious pitfalls. This commonality may have been what Karnon’d meant by presenting Henry with that lake-producing artefact from the bygone past before Henry's own recognition, may have been the intended meaning of the cryptic assertion that the two of them—contradictory in almost every apparent respect—shared the same heart. Karnon, by undergoing a similar process of recognising his true position to his world, had been liberated from his Cycle-induced madness. In this way, the two figures of the tyrant and the trickster, who should by all accounts have been opposed, might have converged upon the same aim: to break free from the shackles of their past selves and become something better.

That could very well be the secret heart of this story.

Or that could be the fatal trick, the mad God feeding upon the madnesses that Henry'd exchanged for his previous madness.

Henry couldn’t be definite about it. Where others might attach to knowledge and self-insight the instantaneous, miraculous power of transformation, Henry had much less hope. In changing one’s most entrenched flaws, knowledge was helpful but not always sufficient. He was himself an absurd example of its limitations. By comprehending the mechanics of The Cycle to this depth, he’d given himself a jarring glimpse of the code ticking in the background of Saana, the aspects that were unambiguously unreal and contrived, that could be gamed and cheated. Through his contact with Hannes, he had a phoneline to the universe’s creator, could call up ‘god’ at any time and lodge a direct complaint about the defects in his product. This level of insight into the gross anatomy of this virtual universe should, rationally, have destroyed all and any sense of immersion. He, more than any other player, should have been able to perceive Saana for what it was, a poorly-designed videogame. With his 'duty' to this videogame done, it should have been trivial for him to move on.

Henry passed out from exhaustion.

A dreamless place, tens of millions of bodies stacked in a pile, all of them in various states of dying.

The bottom layer was composed of gargantuan monsters with tentacles split, wings severed, fangs smashed, eyesockets emptied. Above them lay the smaller monsters in no better state. Then there was the layer of soldiers, the elves, the dwarves, and the humans in armour pierced and crushed. Above them, there were the criminals with nooses around their necks, decapitated heads, and faces white from bloodletting. And the topmost layer was the citizens, the men, the women, and the children, whose skin had been blackened by the flames of the castles in which they'd sheltered, stained red from the detonation of family.

None were fully-dead, though. Stuck for eternity in the last moments of their lives, the dying squirmed and shoved, wailed and howled to be freed from the crushing mass of each other.

On the face of this mountain of the near-dead, a solitary figure would climb. Using the bodies as hand- and foot-holds, he would be forced to dig his fingers deep into their flesh to secure his grip. The closer he would draw near to the summit, the steeper would grow the mountain, the fiercer the gale winds that eternally threatened to knock him off.

He'd lost count of how many times he'd fallen and been forced to restart. This time, too, he would fall, he knew. Nevertheless, he could not stop the climb.

The climber was presently at the very base amongst the worst of the monsters. From the bottom, the peak was invisible and the breeze was so light it wouldn’t disturb a hair.

At the base, studying the shifting layout of the handholds, he was joined by a red-skinned woman. Tall, with sinewy muscles and a square-shaped face, her feminine side was visible mostly in her ornamentation, in a hibiscus flower threaded through hair grown to the waist and a sarong with a dye-pattern fit for a monarchess.

“Is this where I end up?” she asked the climber. “I suppose you'll wedge me near the bottom with the rest of these hideous things.”

Plan’s cancelled, he mumbled grotesquely through lips sewn shut by barbed wire.

The woman smirked at the monstrous discipline to hide his motives from her even here. “So this is where I end up.” She surveyed the mountain with disgust, regret, and mutual respect. “How do I die this time?”

Old age. The climber sprinted at a shrieking dragon, using its thrusting nose as a launching pad to rocket himself upwards and instantly out of sight.