Author Description

For lead game designer Cypher Cooper, life is a fog of silent grief and sleepless nights. He's going through the motions, his mind unspooling, wishing something would pull him back from the brink. Then, a horrific accident offers a twisted form of escape, plunging him into a reality where he is a god. He awakens in a world that bends to his will. With a thought, he can raise mountains, sculpt cities of impossible geometry, and command the sun. But this paradise is a prison. His creations are beautiful but hollow, meticulously crafted yet empty to the touch. The silent, faceless inhabitants he creates, the Wards, are merely reflections of his own inescapable loneliness. Haunted by glitches in his self-made heaven-a mysterious entity known as the Witness, a haunting reversed lullaby, and a single red balloon that cannot be unmade-Cypher finds his control slipping. Every attempt to recreate cherished memories or forge a true connection is corrupted, turning his power into a curse. The more he builds to escape his past, the more the walls of his cage close in. As his sanity unravels in a loop of creation and destruction, Cypher is forced to confront a terrifying revelation: this dreamscape is not a sandbox, but a mirror reflecting the devastating truth of the life he fled. When a cryptic countdown appears in the sky, he realizes the system is shutting down, and his session is ending. A mind-bending journey into the architecture of grief and control, this story questions the very nature of reality. When the world you've built to protect yourself becomes your ultimate prison, is waking up an escape, or just a deeper layer of the dream?