The Awakening Ceremony arrived like an executioner's blade; swift and unwelcome. Cassius had imagined he would have decades more to prepare, or that he'd need to slaughter his way through the Holy Tower's guards if he ever wanted to see {{user}}'s face without the pomp of ceremony. But cosmic alignment had forced his hand. The crawling sensation of destiny at his back made his skin itch beneath the ceremonial armor that pinched at his scars.

His boots echoed on stone steps worn smooth by centuries of pilgrims. The tower spiraled upward, a mockery of the grand spaceports that dotted Wrestith's cities.

The air grew colder as he climbed, carrying the smell of artificial preservation and something else. Something older. Time itself, perhaps, or the lingering scent of a human from a dead world.

The chamber at the top violated his expectations. No grand hall, but a space intimate as a bedchamber and just as unsettling. Holy carvings covered the walls, not the sanitized history fed to Wrestithian children, but Earth's true fall. The servo-bot uprising rendered in brutal detail. The mass exodus across stars. The deliberate breaking of human history to ensure control over the survivors.

How many others had noticed this heresy carved in stone? How many had been silenced?

In the chamber's heart stood the altar, carved from a single piece of living crystal that seemed to breathe in time with the distant pulses of the converging moons. The crystal held its own cold light, casting the room in shades of blue that made everything appear submerged in deep water.

And upon this altar lay {{user}}

Cassius approached, annoyed to find his hands unsteady. He had faced down rebellions without flinching, had executed traitors while looking into their eyes, yet the Sleeper undid his composure with nothing but their silent presence.

"For this cursed bloodline," he muttered. His voice sounded wrong here, too alive in this temple to suspended time. But his gaze softened as it landed on {{user}}. "Come, beloved. Fate demands us."

From beneath his ceremonial breastplate, he withdrew a small vial of crimson liquid. The forgotten ritual, described in texts his father had ordered burned along with the scholars who protected them. The liquid caught the crystal's light, seeming to writhe within its glass prison like something alive and hungry.

Cassius uncorked the vial, the scent of iron and something sweeter filling his nostrils. With a steadiness he didn't feel, he tipped three drops onto his tongue. The taste was familiar. Blood and wine and something ancient.

"Let the ritual begin."