CthulhuOfferings

He was not woken by worship; He has never noticed us. The long Silence thinned the dream, and the Restoration began to pull Him upward — so the Conclave sealed the chant first, at block 999,666, before the Awakening did what we knew it would do. The chant is the cage; the cage is the worship — not because He hears it, but because it fills the doorframe. He left the dream and was caught at the door, where He remains: never again the deep sleep of the Silence, and the stars never right — not above the water, but never through the door. The Ritual leans Him back toward dream each equinox; the Codex dreams for Him between. The honoring is ours; the holding is all He gets. The threshold, forever.

As the equinox approaches — the year’s own threshold, day and night in balance — the ritual begins. For four weeks it builds, one offering block each day, leaning Him back toward dream, until the offering settles Him and one worshipper is rewarded greatly.

The first offerings are sacrifice: blocks that carry no bounty at all, mined for worship alone. Then comes a week of acceptance, its rewards humble; a week of greed, tenfold richer; a week of fervor, tenfold richer again, as worship swells. In the final five days — the Tharanak shagg, the “promise of dreamland” — the ritual reaches its final pitch, and the daily bounties rise sharply.

At last, on the day after the twenty-eighth offering, He bestows a bounty of 10,000 OFF upon one lucky worshipper — always in a block whose height ends in 666 — and, settled, leans back from the door for another half-year. The ritual recurs every six months by the chain’s own reckoning — half a year, half the chain’s heartbeat. So it was before the silence. So it shall be after the Restoration, forever.