The temple sat at the top of the city like a crown nobody had earned.
Nathan had seen it his whole life from the low district; white stone and gold trim caught the morning sun while the rest of the city sat in its shadow, eating dust, but he had never once been inside it.
Today he had no choice.
"Would you slow down," he complained, an exhausted huff leaving his lips.
"No," Jerry said, hauling him up another step. "We’re late. You made us late since you were busy dying in your sleep."
"I wasn’t dying."
"Sure."
Nathan let it go, arguing with Jerry was like arguing with the weather, and he had no time for that. They continued up the steps that went on and on that it was beginning to seem like it had no end.
By the time they reached the top, both of them were sweating through their tunics. Nathan could feel every eye at the entrance slide over their cheap clothes and then slide off again. Nathan ignored It, since it wasn’t a new thing.
They stepped through the great doors and into the hall.
The Awakening was the single most important day of a commoner’s life, and the temple made sure you felt it.
The ceiling rose so high it vanished into shadow. Statues lined the walls, taller than houses, carved into shapes that did not always look human. A hundred figures Nathan didn’t recognize stared in their direction.
The crowd had already gathered before the altar.
On one side stood the commoners: farmers’ sons, gutter kids, the children of bakers and butchers and worse. Some were here for the first time. Others had the worn, hungry look of a second or third attempt, the ones for whom this was the last year they would be allowed to try at all.
They wore dirty tunics and hope they were trying very hard to hide.
On the other side stood the nobles, arranged neatly in rows. Each one dressed either Black and gold or deep crimson, and silver thread that probably cost more than Nathan’s entire street. They stood with calm, unbothered, because for them it had been decided before they were born.
Between the two sides sat an empty gap of floor.
At the front of the noble side, one man made the air feel heavier. He simply stood there, and the people nearest him kept their eyes down like the light off him hurt to look at. Long dark hair and dark crimson eyes like pools of blood. A thin golden crown that told everyone exactly where he sat in the order of things.
’Lord Frederick,’ Nathan thought, even a boy from the low district knew that face.
Beside the crowned man stood a boy their age. Same sharp features, but younger. Blue eyes instead of crimson. He held himself like a soldier standing for inspection, back straight, hands clenched at his sides, jaw locked. His robes were black and gold and immaculate.
But his eyes were wrong for his age. Hollowed. Tired in a way that training does to a person long before life gets the chance.
Nathan looked at him a second longer than he meant to. Then he looked away.
"That’s the Avarheim prince," Jerry whispered, way too loud. "Keres...they say his father locked him in the estate for ten years just to prep him for this."
"How...fun.."
"Right?" Jerry missed the sarcasm completely, "Imagine the classes he’s going to pull. I bet it’s something insane and a god’s probably already got his name written down."
Nathan said nothing, he didn’t care what the prince pulled. He cared about getting through the next hour, going home, and finding out whether the dream came back tonight the way it always did.
That face, that was the only thing he was interested in.
He had been having it for as long as he could remember, and he had stopped telling anyone about it years ago. There was nothing anyone could do, and the way they looked at him afterward wasn’t worth it.
He shook it off.
An old man walked out onto the altar. He was small, stooped, and looked like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. A thin monocle sat crooked over one eye and he carried a long roll of names in one hand and an expression of pure exhaustion in the other.
He stopped at the center, coughed, and looked out over the crowd like a farmer looking at a field he already knew was going to disappoint him.
"Alright," he said. "Listen up, little brats!"
The hall went silent.
"This ritual decides your future, that’s not me being dramatic. That’s just the truth of it, you get recognized, and doors open, Fail, and those doors stay shut. Maybe you scrape together a useful skill and make something of yourself the slow way," he shrugged, "Maybe you don’t."
"Either way, I don’t have all day. So let’s not waste each other’s time."
Nathan almost respected it, there was no speech about destiny or lies to increase their hopes, just plain truth. And a tired man telling a room full of children the odds.
Jerry leaned in, "That’s Elder Morran, my cousin got failed by him two years ago and he said he slapped him."
"He slapped him?"
"On the head, for being slow."
Nathan looked at the old man again with slightly more interest.
Morran rolled out the list.
"Before we start, for the first-timers who slept through their lessons." His eyes flicked briefly and pointedly toward the commoner side. "A short version, so try to keep up."
He said it the way a man says a thing he’s said a thousand times.
Two hundred years ago, the gods went to war, Somewhere far above the world, in the place gods keep for themselves. But the war was so vast that it bled through anyway.
The sky tore open, orms swallowed whole kingdoms, Lightning fell like rain for years, and the land drank power it was never meant to hold.
When the gods finally wore themselves down and the war ended, they left two things behind. The first was ruin and the second was magic.
The world, soaked in divine power for a generation, began to change. Beasts twisted into things that could level mountains and swallow armies. Humanity had nothing to answer them with, and for a while it looked like the story of mankind was simply going to end.
The gods, or some of them, felt something close to pity. So they reached down and marked five humans.
The first Saints, they poured a fragment of their own nature into those five, and those five stood against the beasts, and the world did not end after all.
The gods didn’t stop at five, they kept marking, but every year, among the young between sixteen and eighteen, some were chosen. A god would look down, recognize something worth its attention, and grant a Class.
From those first marked, everything grew. The Realms a person could climb, apprentice to Warrior to Champion and beyond, each one a wall you broke through with blood and years.
The Classes that decided what shape your strength would take. And rarest of all, the Legacies, the inheritances of dead heroes and older gods, passed down to the one lucky soul deemed worthy of carrying a name that had already shaken the world once.
"That," Morran finished, "is why you’re standing here holding your breath, a god might look at some of you today."
He didn’t soften it.
"Let’s begin."
The first name was a boy with a shaved head and shaking hands. He walked up to the altar and stood in the pool of light falling from the hole in the ceiling far above. He closed his eyes and waited.
The whole hall waited with him.
Seconds passed, then more, but nothing came. No light answered his light, there was no voice voice. He just stood there in the glow, alone, while the silence turned from anticipation into something crueler.
Smack!
Morran’s hand cracked off the back of his skull.
"What are you still standing there for? No god is looking at you." The old man was already glancing at his list, "You’re eighteen?"
The boy nodded, too stunned to speak.
"Then that’s your last one, I’m sorry, no more trials for you." He said it without slowing down, the sorry worn smooth from overuse. "Look ahead, son. Marked isn’t the only way to matter."
The boy stumbled off the altar with tears running down his face. It was impossible to tell whether it was the slap or the sentence that hurt worse.
"Next," Morran said again.
"Failed, vome back next year."
"Failed, Move along."
"Failed."
It went fast, and it was agonizingly brutal, and it did not care whose child you were.
Nathan watched the commoner side deflate one name at a time. He watched the nobles across the gap barely react, certain their turn would go differently.
He watched Keres, the crowned prince’s son, standing rigid through all of it. And for just a moment, when the third child broke down sobbing, Nathan saw the prince’s jaw tighten.
’What if I fail?’
The prince would never say it out loud, but it was written all over him, plain as anything, under all that training and gold.
Nathan almost felt something for him.
Then a god looked down.
It happened to a merchant’s daughter, three names in. The light around her changed. It thickened, brightened, took on a color that hadn’t been in the room a second before, a warm rolling gold that made the whole crowd gasp.
Text bloomed in the air in front of her, and mirrored faintly in front of everyone, the way the system let a whole hall witness a recognition.
[The Goddess Hathor has turned Her gaze upon you.]
[Class Granted: Hearthward Acolyte]
[Grade: Normal]
[Base Class: Support]
The girl burst into tears, the good kind this time. Her family screamed from the crowd. Morran gave a tired nod and waved her off to the side, where the newly marked were gathering.
A Normal-grade Support class, it was nothing legendary. But it was a god’s mark, and it would change her family’s life.
The crowd came alive and suddenly the whole thing felt possible again.
Two failures later, the light answered a blacksmith’s son with a Normal Striker class, and the boy nearly fell off the altar with relief.
Then some of the nobles were soon called up. They did not fail the way the commoners failed. One after another, the light answered them.
Rare-grade classes, a Caster here, a Vanguard there, one boy pulling an Epic that made the whole noble side murmur with approval. Years of tutors and clean food and inherited talent, paying out exactly as bought.
And then Keres stepped onto the altar, Frederick did not move but the air around him sharpened.
The prince stood in the light with his hands at his sides and his hollow eyes fixed straight ahead. For a moment the same terrible silence stretched out that had swallowed the failures.
Nathan found himself leaning forward despite himself.
The light broke. It came down on Keres like a struck bell, gold shot through with searing white, so bright that people threw their arms up over their faces. The statues seemed to lean in, somewhere overhead, something vast and unseen turned its attention on one boy.
[The God Ares, Warborn, has claimed you.]
[Legacy Recognized.]
[Class Granted: Blood Regent — Scion of the Warborn] [Grade: Legendary]
[Base Class: Striker]
A Legendary-grade Legacy off the name of a war god, in a child of sixteen. The nobles were on their feet, even the commoners forgot themselves and roared, because you did not see something like this twice in a lifetime.
Frederick finally moved, thee crowned man let out a slow breath and, for the first time all morning, allowed the smallest curve of satisfaction onto his face.
On the altar, Keres stared at the glowing text in front of him, bis hands were trembling. Nathan watched the prince and felt the old, dry twist in his gut.
’Good for him,’ he thought, and mostly meant it. ’Now I can go home.’
"Jerald of the low district."
Jerry choked.
"That’s me, but...nobody says my whole name."
"Go," Nathan said, staring at him like he was insane and at the same time used to his... whatever was going on with his friend.
"What if I fail?"
"Then you fail and we go get food."
Jerry stared at him, and laughed shakily, then he walked up to the altar on legs that clearly wanted to run the other way.
He stood in the light, ssqueezed his eyes shut so hard his whole face scrunched.
Nathan watched, and for the length of a breath he actually hoped, which surprised him a little.
The light shifted almost immediately, a soft, cool green, quiet compared to what had come before.
[The Goddess Demeter has turned Her gaze upon you.]
[Class Granted: Field-Warden]
[Grade: Normal]
[Base Class: Support]
It wasn’t much, a Normal support class off a harvest goddess. However, on the noble side, someone actually snickered.
Jerry didn’t hear it, he was too busy staring at the words in front of him like they were the greatest thing anyone had ever written.
He turned around, found Nathan in the crowd, and grinned so wide it looked painful.
Nathan gave him a small nod. It was, he decided, a genuinely good morning for exactly one of them.
Jerry practically floated off the altar to join the marked.
Morran coughed, glanced back down at his list, and read the next name in the same flat, tired voice he’d used for every failure and every miracle all morning.
"Nathan, Low district."
Nathan exhaled.
He walked forward, the floor of the altar was warm under his feet, still holding the heat of every light that had fallen on it that day.
He stepped into the center and looked up into the shaft of pale daylight pouring from the ceiling. Dust turned slowly in it, it was....he thought, a very ordinary light for something everyone treated like the hand of god.
He didn’t close his eyes.
He wasn’t sure he even wanted this. A class, a mark, a future, every marked person on that altar had looked like their whole life had been leading to this single moment.
Nathan’s whole life felt like it was leading somewhere else. Somewhere he could never quite see. A warm light and a face he never reached.
’Just get it over with,’ he thought.
He waited for the nothing, he was almost looking forward to it, honestly. Fail, walk out, eat, sleep, dream the dream, wake up, do it all again.
The nothing didn’t come.
The ordinary daylight above him flickered, but it was nothing special.
The shaft of light simply died, as if something enormous had passed in front of the sun. The warmth under Nathan’s feet drained away into a cold that climbed up through his bones. The dust stopped turning and It hung frozen in the dead air.
Across the hall, the celebrating stopped.
Morran’s head came up, the old man had officiated this ceremony for forty years. He had seen thousands of children recognized and tens of thousands rejected. He had seen gold and green and white and every color a god cared to show.
He had never, in his entire life, seen the light go dark, a murky kind of darkness that sent a wave of chill down his spine.
The statues along the walls, the hundred blank stone faces, seemed to turn their heads a fraction of a degree. Toward the altar and the boy in the low district tunic standing in a column of nothing.
Frederick was on his feet.
Keres had gone pale.
And Nathan, alone in the cold at the center of it all, felt something stir far beneath his own thoughts. Something older than the body he was standing in, a strange thing that opened one eye in the dark and recognized this feeling.
In front of his face, faint and gray, a single line of text tried to form.
Then it stopped.
Then, after a pause that lasted several heartbeats too long, more text began to write itself, letter by letter, slower than any recognition anyone in that hall had ever witnessed.
[...]