Just like his father, Flamebearer, on the brink of death, took hold of his own child's hand.
But the Flamebearer of this moment could no longer grip that young hand tightly, for his own hand was now missing three whole fingers — sheared clean off by a blade of ice the giants' priest had conjured while he was casting his magic.
Yes: over the long war, the giants of the northern ice-plains had learned to use the power of a god as well.
To use the power of another god.
"So you must present still more offerings to the Snake God...... by now, I fear, only the Snake God can put an end to all this."
Mind blurring, Flamebearer clutched at that young hand with all his strength, leaving his successor one last charge.
"Your grandfather — that Lightbringer — I've told you everything of him...... your grandfather said, 'Don't overthink, and don't dream things up.' Let me add one more line here."
Scene after scene of the past rose before his eyes, and Flamebearer instinctively clenched his teeth.
"Don't be too clever for your own good. If things can still hold as they are, then keeping to the status quo is always better than risking your own neck."
This, too, was the sum of Flamebearer's life's experience — and the thing he most bitterly regretted. Had he not fancied himself the strongest mage and charged to the front of the line, hoping to end this endless war by his own hand alone, he would never have fallen into the giants' encircling slaughter, never have been the first to go down.
After he — the chieftain — fell, the mages and hunters who'd held the advantage were thrown at once into panic, and what followed was a one-sided massacre.
The mages burned their very lives to hurl fireballs and barely tore open a path of retreat; hunter after hunter threw himself onto the giants' sharp bone-blades so the gravely wounded chieftain could be pulled back...... yet even at so steep a price, the Flamebearer they saved was already mortally wounded, at death's door.
Even the finest witch doctor declared it beyond saving.
"So you must be steady...... be steady above all! Don't be like me!
"And remember — keep offering sacrifice to the Snake God, until the Snake God answers us......"
Recalling the offerings of these past years, time after time met with no answer, Flamebearer could not close his eyes even as the breath left him.
He did not know where he had gone wrong, why he had never once received an answer from the Snake God.
He did not understand.
And he could not accept it.
"Father!!!"
Watching Flamebearer depart the world, his heir — the Twenty-first chieftain, Lifeburner — threw himself upon the corpse, weeping bitterly.
Lifeburner — as the name suggests, this Twenty-first chieftain had a rather fiery temper. After his brief grief, the burly young man was already burning with rage, ready to go and fight the giants who had killed his father to the death.
But that maimed hand, though the life had long gone out of it, still gripped him fast.
Which drew a deep breath out of Lifeburner.
To honor his father's dying wish, he had to force down the urge to charge in. Just as his father had said: be steady, be steady above all — and in truth, beneath his fury, he knew well enough in his own heart that to charge in now would be no different from suicide.
So, once he'd calmed himself, Lifeburner ordered the mages and the soldiers — the former hunters — to turn to the defensive: as long as the giants couldn't break through to them, it would count as success.
He himself, with Flamebearer's body and a portion of the guard, returned to Ignis City.
This return was chiefly for two things: one, to bury his father, the late chieftain; the other, naturally, to go to the sacred mountain as the Twenty-first chieftain and meet that Snake God face to face.
Like his father before him, Lifeburner carried a great mass of offerings into the mountain.
And like his father before him, Lifeburner too received no answer from the Snake God.
But at handling the offerings, Lifeburner was already an old hand. Half a day was all it took; realizing the Snake God would not come, Lifeburner set to cooking all that raw meat through — many of these offerings were game the hunters had brought in, but once it was all turned to cooked meat, no one could tell where the meat had come from.
Yet even these offerings were not enough to fill Ignis City's food gap.
"At the root of it, it's because the people have grown too many......"
Lifeburner heaved a sigh.
To ease his father's burden, he had once studied the matter closely — for his father had all but worn himself to the bone trying to find his people a mouthful to eat. But after looking into it in earnest, Lifeburner found that even if you summoned back his grandfather, that Nineteenth Sage King, he likely couldn't have handled it either.
Simply because, back when his grandfather was called the Sage King, there hadn't been nearly so many people in the city.
In fact, back then there was no city to speak of at all. The Ignis City of those days had been only a small village, a hundred-odd souls, not even a thousand; the surrounding land had been enough to feed every last one of them. But his grandfather, under the Snake God's guidance, had done far too well — not only pioneering all manner of new methods for handling food, but raising the level of the tribe's witch doctors by a great margin, vastly cutting the number of deaths among the people.
And that, directly, had swelled the people over the past several decades from a small village of fewer than a thousand into a vast city of close to ten thousand.
As for why his grandfather's generation had no such trouble — that was because the newborn children were all still small and ate little, while by the time his grandfather passed and his father took over, those numerous newborns had just grown up. And so the food that had seemed ample turned, in an instant, scarce.
"Even if the Snake God truly appeared and the Harvest Festival went off without a hitch, this gap wouldn't be so easy to fill."
The thought made Lifeburner's head ache all the more. It was precisely because he saw the problem clearly that he could see, just as clearly, that solving it was nothing a few battles and a little stolen food could accomplish.
"And now this problem has landed on my head."
Drawing a deep breath, Lifeburner gave a helpless, bitter smile.
He would likely be the most useless of all the chieftains down the generations.
For a problem like this, he truly could think of no solution.
The days of winter passed one by one; stored food always runs out in the end, the beasts had all hidden away in the deep mountains, and the hunters' yields grew ever poorer — watching the days slip by, Lifeburner felt as though a rope were looped around his neck, drawing tighter and tighter.
"It'll all be eaten up soon, won't it?"
Lifeburner had gradually gone numb. Much as he wanted to solve this — even at the cost of his own life — this was not a thing willingness to die could accomplish.
Lifeburner had braced himself to bear the people's fury, had even braced himself to step down and yield his seat to someone worthier.
But to Lifeburner's surprise, the food shortage never came.
By the time spring warmed the land and the cold wind turned mild, Lifeburner was still in something of a daze. The food problem that had plagued Ignis City for years seemed, somehow, to have solved itself without his noticing.
"Why? Could it be everyone's started eating less?"
For a while Lifeburner was baffled.
But soon he found the crux of it.
It wasn't that the people were eating less.
It was that too many of them had died in the war.
His father — that Flamebearer — had fought a rare and crushing defeat, had even let many of the people die at the giants' hands. But the loss of those people had, in turn, spared Ignis City a great share of its food consumption.
"This......"
Lifeburner suddenly felt as though he'd stumbled onto something dreadful.
"Father was right......
"You really do have to be steady. You really do have to keep things as they are."