Creator: The [deep.sleeper] Saga

The Premise

Three researchers on an interstellar ship used a machine called The Loom to build a pocket universe, then put their minds inside it while their bodies stayed behind in the real world, a place called Subsume, hooked to machines, unconscious, sitting in three chairs in the same room with nobody coming to wake them up.

One of the researchers, Garrett Hathaway, didn't make it through clean, and his mind broke apart inside The Loom, splitting into two things: Iso, the divine half, and the seeds of Moonsetter, the human half, which splintered further into three children named Sonder, Isaac, and Naomi. The other two researchers transferred fully, with Daniel Larus becoming Megiddo and Kwan Oxhand becoming Camael, though none of them know what they are and all of them believe they were born inside this world.

The pocket universe, called Paradigm, contains two sister planets: Gealga, which is living and governed by Iso, and Galadros, which is dying and overrun by hollow automatons called Manikins. Left unchecked, Paradigm would collapse on itself, so Iso built a Cycle to hold it together where the three fragments grow up every cycle, reunite, kill Iso, merge into Moonsetter, and the world resets. This has happened 999 times, and the system was never going to last forever because it's running out.

The Games

vol01
What The Sky Looks Like

Sonder is a Sentinel on Galadros, stationed at Facility Five and clearing out Manikins, until something goes wrong during a routine day at a training pool where everyone around him dies and he doesn't remember doing it. A woman named Bianca takes him underground to Lornis, a massive city built inside a chasm, where he joins a small resistance cell called GLI and starts dreaming about people he's never met, with the dreams getting longer and more specific each time. He begins seeing rectangular tears in space that nobody else can see, and the world he thought he knew turns out to be much smaller than the one he's being pulled into. By the end he reaches the surface for the first time in his life.

vol02
The Weather In October

On Gealga, the living planet, the people from Sonder's dreams turn out to be real, and the story follows an ensemble cast converging around LiGore, president of the Cyferia League, who is running experiments with Mirrors and Pale energy that he may not fully understand himself. The party investigates a web of secret facilities, traverses The Pale across multiple worlds, fights the Order governing it, and reaches Iso on Gealga's moon where what they find and the choices Sonder makes under pressure from forces he can't see reframe everything from vol01. The world that comes out the other side is not the one that went in.

vol03
Under The Same Sun

New protagonist. Lexy carries a sword forged from a mech that belonged to someone he doesn't remember being, bonded to a creature called Yael living inside him that won't shut up, and chained by a shadow government called CEDA with explosive necklaces that keep him and his family in line. Alongside Shell, a kid carrying Sonder's displaced soul, and Escher, a man whose true nature is the cruelest reveal in the story, the final volume peels back every remaining layer of the Cycle, the Contacts, and the machine that built the world, and it turns out the man pulling the strings is the most afraid person in the room.

The Pale

Think of every world as a room, The Pale as the hallway connecting them, and The Loom as the architect that is still building.

Mirrors are rectangular tears hovering in space, visible only to people tuned to The Pale, and walking through one puts you in the hallway while most people can't see them at all. Sonder can get there in his sleep, which isn't supposed to be possible.

The Pale stores everything from every memory, every experience, and every death, across every world and every cycle, and it never clears. After 999 cycles of accumulated data from six tethered realities, the sheer weight of it is physically breaking the walls between worlds, and Sonder's traversal of Mirrors feeds and accelerates the problem because the hallway stretches, the walls between rooms wear thin, and The Loom builds faster in response trying to keep up.

Inside, the corridors are institutional with black-and-white checkered floors, fluorescent light with no source, rooms that shouldn't connect, and time that doesn't match the outside since hours out there can be weeks in here. There are settlements, and the biggest is August, a city outside time run by The Order of Eso Torment on Iso's behalf, with the name being an anagram of "Moonsetter." You can walk through other people's memories in The Pale, and sometimes those memories notice you and sometimes they fight back.

The Cycle

After The Grove fell in the first cycle, Iso fled into The Pale, found The Loom, and sacrificed his omnipotence to create a self-correcting loop because without it the universe would collapse entirely.

Every cycle follows a pattern where Iso rules as Orchestrator while the world slowly decays, and then the three fragments grow up, reunite, and kill him. If all three are alive at his death they merge automatically into Moonsetter, who becomes the new Orchestrator, and the world falls into chaos until Iso returns in a new physical form and quells Moonsetter using a physical object tied to Sonder's life that cycle. This cycle it's his mech frame, and in past cycles it has been a sword, a pendant, a lute, because the object itself doesn't matter and the connection to Sonder is what matters. The cycle then resets and the fragments are reborn as children, and Moonsetter never remembers being quelled.

Normal people have no awareness of the cycle beyond some deja vu and occasional scholarly theories that never go anywhere. Sonder, Isaac, Naomi, and a few others learn their roles through dreams of past cycles that get stronger as they approach their purpose, while A and B, Iso's first two creations, retain complete memories through every cycle. A stays and helps because he is loyal to the universe above any individual, and B concluded the whole thing is meaningless and left without drama one day.

The critical tension is that Iso wants to maintain the cycle, and the cycle requires Sonder to eventually kill him, which he accepts. What he opposes is Sonder going off-script and meddling with Mirrors, which threatens the infrastructure the cycle runs on, because the cycle can survive Iso dying but it cannot survive the walls between realities collapsing.

The Grove

The first cycle began in The Grove, which was a garden, a city, and a floating landscape at once, with tiered platforms of white stone suspended in open sky, canopied walkways, gardens spilling over edges, water channeled through architecture, and towers that curved. It was a euphoric utopia that lasted for centuries, long enough for culture and routine to take root, and long enough for people to forget it could end.

Sonder, Isaac, and Naomi grew up there with something resembling a real childhood while A and B served as caretakers of society. Lauda was a devoted follower of Iso, Lasorsa observed quietly, and Camael and Megiddo held positions of trust. Lexy's first incarnation wandered in through a Mirror from another world, meek and lost, and was taken in by the community.

Megiddo became obsessed with the Mirror and proposed sending the Guardians, soulless protectors of The Grove, into The Pale as scouts, but Iso refused because The Grove would be left defenseless. So Megiddo recruited Camael by offering him significance, and Camael corrupted the Guardians from the inside. The fall was instantaneous, going from paradise to hell in a single moment as the Guardians turned on everything and fire and disintegration consumed the kingdom from the inside out, with only one Guardian named Shekinah resisting and shielding Sonder.

The three children were dying, and Iso panicked and forced them into one entity. Moonsetter was born from pure trauma, finished burning what was left of The Grove, and the first cycle ended in fire. Megiddo followed Iso into The Pale and went dormant, and Camael followed him. One to save, and one to destroy.

Cast

Sonder / Shell

One of the three fragments of Moonsetter and a Sentinel from Galadros who killed his friends at the pool and doesn't remember how, which left him quiet and guarded for obvious reasons. He can access The Pale through dreams, which nobody else can do, and he dreams of people and places from other worlds before ever meeting them. After the events of vol02 his soul gets displaced into a newborn called Shell, who becomes the lead of vol03. The name "Sonder" carries a double meaning as both the realization that every stranger around you is living a life as vivid and complete as your own and the German word for "special," and both apply to him.

Iso

The divine half of Garrett Hathaway, who has been holding the Cycle together for 999 iterations while his body falls apart doing it. His true form sits on Eder, Gealga's moon, emaciated and hooked to a machine that A and B built to let him remotely inhabit other people's bodies. He created the Manikins centuries ago under the name Dollmaker to thin Galadros's population and speed up the cycle, and he once loved a woman named Lady Bask and tried to resurrect her through them, but it didn't work and only produced hollow copies. He is not evil, but rather the only thing keeping the ceiling from caving in while knowing full well that the ceiling is going to cave in anyway.

Moonsetter

The human half of Garrett Hathaway, born from the trauma of three children watching The Grove burn. Moonsetter is wrath given form, and every cycle he emerges when the three fragments reunite and merge. In cycle 999 the merge is incomplete because Naomi is dead, producing a Moonsetter made only of Sonder and Isaac who has no identity and no memory, waging a purposeless war between the kingdoms of Belcarra and Anamora on the continent of Atonement in Parallax as a twisted atonement for sins he cannot remember. Megiddo influences him while searching for The Loom, and it takes Shell fusing with him mid-vol03 to restore enough humanity for him to fight with purpose again.

LiGore

Runs the Cyferia League and is actually Iso piloting a man named Lusa, except a third personality emerged that is neither of them and doesn't know what he is. He has thin, vague memories that don't hold when he reaches for them, like reading someone else's journal and confusing their memories for his own, and he dreams of a room with a body in a chair hooked to machines where he feels that when it breathes he moves and when it thinks he speaks. The Iso part of him is drawn to Sonder while the LiGore part resents him, and the confusion turns to anger that he takes out on the boy without understanding why he can't just leave him alone.

Lexy / Jacqis

Someone cursed him with 999 lifetimes and thought they were doing him a favor. His body knows how to fight before his brain catches up because it retains skills across incarnations without any memory of learning them. As Jacqis in vol02 he deserts the military after watching a fellow soldier execute a surviving child during a quarantine, and as Lexy in vol03 he lives on a flying sky continent until CEDA comes for him and chains his entire family with explosive necklaces. He carries the Devil Gear, a sword forged from Sonder's mech, which turns out to be the instrument needed to quell Moonsetter, and when his 999 lifetimes of memory finally flood back he feels tortured and used but convinces himself it was for the greater good, though that conviction is fragile.

Chause

From Neo-Earth, which is a whole other situation, and he got pulled into Paradigm during a convergence that ruptured the boundaries between worlds. In vol01 he's been in Lornis for about a week, sent by LiGore to retrieve Sonder, but seeing Sonder interact with a Mirror convinces him the situation is bigger than a retrieval job and he helps Sonder escape instead. In vol02 he's embedded in LiGore's intelligence division investigating from the inside, having cloned a deputy's keycard weeks in advance, and he convinces people by pointing at their own behavior instead of making speeches.

Roo

A mech pilot and mercenary with prosthetic legs who has a past involving a dead commanding officer, stolen genetics, and two child supersoldiers she refuses to call hers, and the details of what was done to her are worse than the summary suggests. She runs the party's field teams with a cap of four per squad, assigns roles without ceremony, and doesn't waste words, reserving what little dark humor she has for herself.

Altercauss

An ancient warrior from the continent of Rudras on Somnuxia who was pulled out of stasis centuries after everyone he knew died and is now looking for his best friend Amarcatune. He doesn't know that Amarcatune was already absorbed by someone he's working alongside, and that killing that person means killing his closest friend without realizing it. He gets slowly pushed out by LiGore's inner circle and sent on assignments they don't expect him to come back from, and he remembers the name of a man he was ordered to kill because that matters to him.

Olive

Originally a princess of Lazertheen on a storybook world called Clover, she keeps being drawn to the same soul across lifetimes without understanding why. She finds Jacqis in vol02 and Lexy in vol03, and the reveal that they're the same person reincarnated devastates both of them. She is half-Furion, which means something specific and unpleasant in this setting because the biological hunger that comes with Furion blood dilutes across generations but never fully goes away.

Haunt van Hay

A CEDA captain from a prestigious family who is arrogant, conflicted, and extremely strong. He is also chained with the same explosive necklace he put on Lexy's family, where he was following orders and feeling more than he showed, and he is a Marrow bonded to a Zygo called Rolsyth that he keeps concealed until an epic battlefield reveal. When CEDA executes his mother in public to keep him in line, his defection is immediate.

Dolpho

Her father Janick walked into Dollmaker's tower 500 years ago, and the Pale energy inside it seeped into her mother's bloodline during pregnancy, producing a malady that primarily affects Dolpho's mind with physical flares manifesting as corrupted limbs. She was put in stasis at age five and woken up at 28 by a man named Escher in a ruined world, and she hunts Shell on bad information until she finds out that Escher is the architect of her family's suffering, at which point she loses an enemy and a father at the same time.

Megiddo

The Contact who is Daniel Larus, and the man who caused The Grove to fall by recruiting Camael. He followed Iso into The Pale and went dormant for 999 cycles studying the system from the inside, and he emerges in vol03 as the apparent central antagonist until someone tells him that ending the cycle kills everyone living inside Paradigm. He refuses to commit genocide and changes sides because he was trying to free Garrett from The Loom and just didn't know the cost.

Camael

The Contact who is Kwan Oxhand and the true antagonist of the entire saga. He has been inside The Pale the entire time, lucid for centuries, sometimes sleeping, sometimes plotting, sometimes reaching into the physical world without entering it, manipulating events and people across cycles from a place nobody can reach. His real motive is not conquest or nihilism but rather a terror of both eternity and oblivion in equal measure, because the paralysis of being stuck between those two fears for centuries became worse than either outcome on its own. He is fighting to force the question to an answer, even if the answer destroys him, and when he discovers in vol03 that he is Kwan, an extension of someone else's consciousness, it shatters what identity he had and finalizes his commitment to total annihilation including his own body in Subsume. He is not fighting to win. He is fighting to stop being afraid.

The Six Worlds

The Pale connects them, and a convergence during the saga ruptures the boundaries between them so that each one pays for it in its own way.

Paradigm / Parallax

The pocket universe The Loom built, containing two planets: Gealga, which is alive with multiple continents governed by various kingdoms and the Cyferia League, and Galadros, which is dead with its surface destroyed by Manikins and nuclear war and its 30,000 survivors living underground in Lornis. After vol02, the incomplete merge collapses Paradigm into Parallax, a warped mirror of itself with multiple continents and floating continents, among which Atonement is the most significant as the site of the war between the kingdoms of Belcarra and Anamora, a conflict that a shadow board called CEDA is making sure never ends.

Somnuxia

A high fantasy world centered on the continent of Rudras, which houses seven kingdoms each with distinct geography and culture, and seven sapient species including humans, the elf-like Yldirians, feline-featured Lamora, and the biologically cannibalistic Furions. Magic here runs on an ether called Siel that is innate to the world's inhabitants, with practitioners called Artists who channel it naturally. The convergence hits the continent with earthquakes and monsoons that tear at the land.

Neo-Earth / Polarity

An alternate modern Earth where the Axis won WWII and demons are a fact of civic life, and the home of Chause, Fan Yang, Amber, Jade, and Kuyu. During vol02, Sonder's interference causes Neo-Earth to split, creating a false copy called Polarity that branches off and grinds against the original like broken gears, two worlds occupying the same space where there should be one. Polarity has its own magic system called Shade, which operates on a spectrum of black, white, and gray as the magic of moral tension, and its own summoning called Anima, which are reflections of the self and distinct from the independent Zygos found elsewhere.

Fallow

A quiet agrarian world built around rest and renewal, home to creatures called Seedkin that grow from earthy pods in the ground and can be domesticated, captured, or left wild depending on the variety. A stewardship body called The Al-Ma manages the ecosystem by handling populations, culls, breeding, and balance, and small practical Magick exists here but nothing world-shaking. The convergence corrupts the Seedkin and poisons the soil, turning a peaceful world hostile.

Zabelin

Started as a government psych experiment called Project Zabelin that tested how long subjects took to realize the world around them wasn't real, and was shut down after three years. A man named Fox Neronha rebuilt the framework as an MMO with Y2K aesthetics so immersive that users forget they aren't physically inside it, though old experiment code still glitches underneath in the form of impossible rooms and NPCs that ask questions they shouldn't know to ask, which players joke about but Fox doesn't. The convergence drags that buried code to the surface as viral anomalies and rogue programs.

Clover

A storybook world of small magicks and lucky coincidences that is innocent without being naive. Olive's homeland, where her original self is a princess of Lazertheen, a verdant medieval kingdom with living parents on the throne. Ether-based magic is accessible and small-scale here, and threats are tricky instead of violent, with a brute king named Huguro up north in Rubadon causing the main problems. The convergence hasn't done its damage yet.

Glossary

The Loom: Machine on the Subsume research ship that builds pocket universes by sampling and rewriting data from existing realities.
The Pale: The space between all worlds that stores every memory from every reality and every cycle and never empties, with the largest settlement being August.
Mirrors: Rectangular tears in space that serve as doors between The Pale and the worlds, visible only to the Pale-Tuned, and which can be natural and stable or artificially forced and unstable in a way that spills Reflections.
Reflections: Emanations of beings, creatures, and events from other realities that spill through Mirrors.
Contacts: The three researchers whose minds are inside Paradigm: Garrett who split into Iso and Moonsetter, Daniel who became Megiddo, and Kwan who became Camael, while their bodies remain unconscious in Subsume.
Pinions: People The Loom copied from existing universes and placed into Paradigm with rewritten lives, none of whom know they're copies.
The Cycle: Iso's self-correcting loop where the fragments grow up, merge, kill him, become Moonsetter, and the world resets, which has happened 999 times and counting.
SIN: Sonder, Isaac, Naomi, collectively the three fragments of Moonsetter.
Manikins: Hollow automatons on Galadros, created by Iso under the name Dollmaker centuries ago to thin the population.
FRAME: Piloted mech, with Sonder's being called Daunting and the Devil Gear sword having been forged from it.
Siel / Artists / Bangles: Siel is an ether-based magic innate to Somnuxia's inhabitants and channeled through wrist-mounted Bangles in the [deep.sleeper] world, with practitioners called Artists.
Zygos / Marrows: Zygos are independent Reflections with real personalities and autonomy who bond with humans called Marrows via a tablet set into the Marrow's armor, and they are not summoned or controlled.
Anima / Shade: Polarity's systems, with Anima being summoned reflections of the self and Shade being the local magic that operates on a spectrum of black, white, and gray.
Seedkin: Pod-born creatures from Fallow that can be domesticated, captured, or left wild depending on the variety.
CEDA: Civil Equilibrium and Defense Authority, a shadow board of eight running the war in Parallax whose name is a lie and who chain assets with explosive necklaces.
The Order of Eso Torment: Five permanent Pale residents who govern it from August on Iso's behalf, with "Eso Torment" being an anagram of "Moonsetter."
The Grove: The utopia of the first cycle, destroyed when the Guardians were corrupted, and where everything started.
Paradigm: The false pocket universe.
Parallax: What Paradigm becomes after the incomplete merge in vol02, with multiple continents and floating continents.
Polarity: The false branch world Sonder created by splitting Neo-Earth during vol02.

Related Titles

Creator - The [deep.sleeper] Saga: The main trilogy of three JRPGs.
Creator - Ordeals: Life-sim spinoff.
Creator - Ordeals: The Shape of Space: MMO.
Polarity: Standalone game set in the branched world with Anima and Shade mechanics.
Sielgarden: Stories set on Somnuxia's continent of Rudras.
Cycle 998: Companion novel with the same cast as cycle 999 but a narrower, LiGore/Yehuda-focused scope.

vol01What The Sky Looks Like

vol02The Weather In October

vol03Under The Same Sun