The Klingon ceremony by which a young warrior declares adulthood, passing between lines of warriors who strike with painstiks, and which is commemorated again on its anniversaries.
The Rite of Ascension marks a Klingon's passage to warrior status. In its first stage a youth declares the intention to become a warrior. In the second, the candidate walks between two lines of Klingons wielding painstiks and must express their deepest feelings while enduring the pain.
The ceremony is first shown in The Icarus Factor. Worf grows irritable as the tenth anniversary of his Age of Ascension approaches with no Klingons nearby to mark it, so Wesley Crusher, Geordi La Forge, Data and others recreate the gauntlet on the holodeck and stand witness.
In Firstborn, Worf presses his reluctant son Alexander to undertake the first rite before he turns thirteen, the age after which a Klingon may never become a warrior.