Arena Cycles

The arena changes only when a pot vests, and never while a challenger is in the queue.

ARENA_SEQUENCE = 8 calibrated
ARENA_ADVANCE_NOTICE = true
VEST_WINDOW_HOURS = 48

Current arena

The Squared Circle

Forge fragment

Inside a roped ring under a single hanging spotlight, canvas floor, darkness beyond the ropes, corner stools visible.

Arena-fit clause

Fit here means human-scale and stripped down: hands, posture, conditioning, and presence. Ranged weapons, mounts, and siege equipment are unsuited by definition — this arena rewards what a fighter is, not what it carries.

Next arena

The Terminal

Advances on the next vest — never mid-queue.

Arena-fit clause

Fit here means close quarters: tight silhouette, short weapons, nothing that needs room to swing. Wide wingspans, long polearms, and bulk read as unsuited.

Arena sequence

Cycle 1

The Gladiator Sands

an open sunlit amphitheatre of ochre stone

Cycle 2

The Drowned Coliseum

the flooded ruin of an arena, green water underfoot

Cycle 3

The Canopy

the vertical green of a vine-choked ruin

Cycle 4

The Squared Circle

a roped ring under a single hanging spotlight

Current

Cycle 5

The Terminal

a narrow neon service corridor, wet floor underfoot

Cycle 6

The Ash Stadium

the centre field of a vast stadium under floodlights, ash falling

Cycle 7

The Frozen Shelf

cracked sea ice under a low white sun, black water at the edges

Cycle 8

The Orbital Ring

the inside of a rotating orbital ring, Earth's limb through the viewport

House standings

How Houses work

One House per arena. A fighter’s House is computed from the wallet that forged it — the same one argument its genes come from — so nobody shops for the winning banner. Allegiance is fate, and that is what makes rivalry mean anything. A House never decides who may fight whom: cross-House matches are the content, not a violation.

House	Reigns	Fighters	Bloodlines	Lords
House Frostvein	5	1	0	0 / 50
House Cindermarkon the seat	2	3	1	0 / 50
House Thornroot	1	1	1	0 / 50
House Nightrail	1	1	1	0 / 50
House Ironcord	0	2	0	0 / 50
House Sandgrave	0	1	0	0 / 51
House Starward	0	1	0	0 / 50
House Deepmere	0	0	0	0 / 51

The same standings are served as JSON from GET /api/houses, and a wallet can see the House it would be born into before it forges, at GET /api/derive/{address}.

Calibration gates — retired

An arena used to pass three gates before entering the sequence, because it added a sentence to the rubric and a miscalibrated one would have cost real money and real trust. The two-axis rubric removed that sentence: an arena now shapes portraits and films and contributes nothing a judge scores, so all three gates measure an empty channel. They are kept here as a record.

Gate A

Ranking stability

Asked whether an arena reshuffled the strong→weak ordering of the calibration roster. Nothing per-arena reaches the panel now, so the ordering cannot move between arenas.

Gate B

Axis independence

Asked whether the clause leaked into the other axes. There is no clause in the judge's context left to leak.

Gate C

No free win

Asked whether arena signifiers alone could beat a strong off-theme fighter. Theme is invisible to the panel now, so it can win nothing.

The gate that would matter again is the day any per-arena string returns to the judge's context. Nothing plans to.

Immutability

A calibrated arena is frozen

Changing a shipped fragment or clause creates a new slug — never an edit. Verdicts must stay reproducible against the exact strings that produced them.

The plate is pinned by hash

An arena's establishing image is content-addressed, so the key and the picture are the same fact. Swap the image and you must change the frozen record.

Sponsors never pick the arena

The arena is inside the judged image, so influence over it would be influence over a result. Barred permanently, not deferred.

Reference

Full arena reference

Every arenaFragments and clauses, verbatim The rubricTwo axes and their anchors The forgeWhat a challenger sends Seat endpointLive arena, live seat

Frozen at coronation

The Reigning Character is fixed when it takes the seat and is never re-forged or re-checked against a later arena. An arena is never an eligibility gate, and since the two-axis rubric it is not a scored one either — a champion cannot be disqualified, or out-scored, for having been forged somewhere else.