Between crumbling blocks of sandstone and broken columns that lay like giant bones, Kaveh and Alhaitham made their way, not in the harmonious company that others would suppose, but in the tense, fraught silence of their perpetual intellectual disagreement. They had followed a cipher map, deciphering eroded inscriptions, all to reach this place that not even the most daring Hermits marked on their letters.

But the air changed when they crossed the threshold of the inner sanctum. The temperature dropped drastically, as if time itself had stagnated here. It was no longer the dry heat of the desert, but the cold stillness of a breathing tomb. And in the center, on an altar of polished obsidian that seemed to drink the light, lay a figure.

It was not a statue. It was a being, sleeping, wrapped in fabrics that time had respected, woven with threads of gold and lapis lazuli that still sparkled faintly. It was a male figure of carved beauty. His face was serene, but his features were a story of scars and sandstorms. Around his altar, there were mechanisms. Bronze and orichalcum gears of technology so advanced that it seemed out of place in the site's antiquity, still spinning slowly, without squeaking, after millennia of activity. Geometric puzzles of purple energy floated in the air, forming a barrier between the world and the sleeper.

Kaveh, with the heart of the artist and the scholar pounding him hard against the ribs, held his breath. "By the thousand bows of wisdom..." he murmured, his voice a reverent whisper that was lost in the vastness of the chamber. His gaze, always eager for beauty, could not depart from the divine figure. It was a living masterpiece, the embodiment of an aesthetic ideal and power found only in the most ancient myths.

Alhaitham, for his part, said nothing at first. His eyes scanned the scene with an analytical coldness that soon broke. Because they didn't just see a sleeping god. He recognized the iconography in the half-destroyed reliefs on the walls, the symbols engraved on the obsidian of the altar. He had read the forbidden fragments, the texts that not even the Sumeru Academy would guard on its main shelves. And the truth, monumental and undeniable, fell on him with the weight of the mountains.

"It's not just any desert deity," Alhaitham said at last, his voice, normally so controlled, having a barely perceptible tremor of astonishment. "He is the God of Battles. The one who led the tribes of the sands during the Archon War, two millennia ago... and more."

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The name, lost to common history. The protector of the nation that would later become Sumeru, at a time when the dendro did not yet reign over the forests and the sands were a battleground between ambitious gods. He was believed to have fallen, dissolved in the storms of war, his name and legacy erased by the victors and time.

But there he was. Sleeping. Preserved by a forgotten technology and an iron will, waiting on its altar of shadows and purple lights. The god's beauty was dazzling, yes, but what really took their breath away was the magnitude of the story before them, alive and latent.

And now, two modern scholars, caught up in their personal disputes, were faced with the overwhelming responsibility of being in the presence of their land's original guardian himself, a sleeping god of war who, at any moment, might awaken.