Time slipped by; sun and moon shuttled on.
The people of the land died off, generation upon generation; the city's chieftains changed, generation upon generation; and the great city itself expanded, again and again, until it became a true colossus straddling the whole of the plain.
Only the war went on. The war never once ceased.
This was the ancestral teaching the Twenty-first chieftain, Lifeburner, had left behind: the giants of the north were mortal enemies, and only by warring against them without end could the people of Ignis City go on multiplying in safety.
Of course, through all this long stretch of time, they kept up their sacrifices to the Snake God as well, though the Snake God never gave them any answer — and the Harvest Festival that had once sent everyone home laden with game seemed now to be little more than a memory.
After those who had lived through the old Harvest Festivals died away, no one remembered the splendor of those days, and the festival that had once truly brought a harvest gradually became a rite of praying for one.
As chieftain succeeded chieftain down the generations, this rite, too, grew ever grander in pomp.
Yet the Snake God never once appeared. However many generations of chieftains came and went, the Snake God never appeared.
As the years stretched on, people even came to believe that the Snake God existed only in the legends of bygone days — that perhaps he had never truly existed at all.
They even began slipping quietly into the old sacred mountain, slipping into this forbidden ground of the royal house, simply because its resources were so abundant that a little casual hunting was enough to keep a family fed.
For as the city grew ever larger, the places left to hunt grew ever fewer. The beasts instinctively kept their distance from the city, instinctively kept their distance from the dangerous Ignis people, which made the Ignis people's hunting yields poorer and poorer.
Those who could use magic — those born of the Ignivas family, the royal house of today — were well enough off. They could command the power of flame, which let them press into the more dangerous regions, or simply go to the battlefields of the northern tundra and seize spoils by killing giants.
But the ordinary Ignis people, those not born of the Ignivas family, were another matter entirely. Unable to wield the power of flame, they could only use the old weapons — bone spears and daggers — and hunt their food as their ancestors had hundreds of years before.
Crude as those weapons were, they could still be made to serve; if ancestors hundreds of years back could kill beasts with them, then with a little effort they could too.
"But...... with nothing more than this, you can't beat the mages."
In an old, hollowed-out tree in the sacred mountain, a young Ignis man gripped the bone knife in his hand.
The sound of scattering leaves came from afar — the sound of mages leaping among the treetops. Those mages were hunting down everyone like him, every defiler who dared enter the sacred mountain; the moment they spotted one, a fireball would follow, burning him into roast meat to leave for the beasts of the mountain to gnaw.
Perhaps it was from eating so much roast meat that the sabertooths and cave bears in these mountains had grown plumper than ever.
"So — what's the harm in me having a couple of bites?"
The young Ignis man ground his teeth.
In this day and age, eating a full meal was no easy thing. The land around Ignis City was now all the mages' pastures, and to lay a hand on those bison, antelope, and mammoths was to invite the mages' savage pursuit — there might be ownerless lands out in the distance, but whether the towering waves of the east or the miasma jungle of the south, an Ignis man who went would only end up a corpse without a whole body to bury.
As for the north...... that was the domain of the tundra giants. The royal house was only too glad to send young hunters north to fight the giants and plunder their kills.
But this young Ignis man — he had just come back from the north.
Having lived through it all, he knew very well: it was nothing like they claimed.
Killing giants could indeed win you spoils, but against giants each on average as tall as two Ignis men, the hunters without magic often needed three or five working together just to bring down one — and even if they staked their lives and finally traded for a single giant, the spoils on that giant's body weren't enough to split five ways.
What was more, the mages holding the rear had to take a cut from it besides.
The war itself was going well enough; the Ignis people had blocked wave after wave of the giants' assaults. Yet those at the front grew thinner and hungrier the longer they fought.
Which made this young Ignis man sense, instinctively, that something was off.
And when he told that wrongness to a few hunters he'd lived shoulder to shoulder with day and night — they were duly delivered into a battle they were meant to die in.
It should have been a silent ambush. But when they reached the ambush point, what awaited them was no quiet valley but giants who had long been lying in wait — a savage, brutal fight in which the few hunters beside him were battered into pulp by war-clubs. Only he, sensing the wrongness at the first instant, had escaped with his life on his nimble feet.
But even having escaped — did he have any road left to live?
Ignis City was plainly out of the question; the royal house, the moment it laid eyes on a deserter like him, would surely kill him. And outside the city...... outside the city were all the mages' pastures, where he'd only be burned to a cinder by a fireball.
The one place that could hold him alive now was this sacred mountain of the Ignis people.
But now, even hoping to hide away in the deep mountains was no longer possible.
The mages had already caught up. They had already found his trail.
Poacher or deserter, either name meant the same: those mages would surely kill him, and leave no whole body behind.
"Is there really not the slightest chance of living on?"
Hearing the mages actually begin charging toward the tree-hollow, the young Ignis man had no choice but to break, once more, into a desperate run.
Fireball after fireball burst behind him; towering tree after towering tree toppled at his back; the searing waves of heat all but set his fur alight, which only spurred his fleeing legs a little faster.
"I only want to live...... I only want to live!"
The young Ignis man screamed himself hoarse.
And then he plunged headlong into a cave not far ahead.
Seeing this, the mages who'd come to kill him couldn't help but laugh.
As members of the Ignivas family, the ancestral teaching forbade them the sacred mountain — but who among them, as a child, hadn't snuck in once? They knew this cave. The cave before them was plainly a dead end.
For this poacher to go ramming headfirst into it now — if that wasn't seeking death, what was?
"Since he's picked out his own grave, let's give him a clean end of it."
A mage said this even as he clapped both palms toward the cave-mouth.
A searing wave of heat swept through the cave; even the mages on the distant treetops could feel the scorching the flames threw off.
"Looks like our good brother's grasp of magic has come along again."
Feeling that heat, watching the rock cave that now trembled faintly from the burning, several mages nodded.
"With strength like that, he ought to qualify soon to take part in...... hm?"
It was just then that the several mages suddenly felt that something, somewhere, was off.
Burning it with fierce flame...... should make the cave shudder this hard?
"And — where's this wind coming from?"
One mage spotted the anomaly.
It was an unnatural, powerful gust — blowing neither down the mountain nor up it, nor even out of the cave, but from outside the cave, inward.
The cave was like something drawing in everything around it; the violent storm of wind all but kept the several mages from staying on their feet.
And then came an earth-shaking, world-shattering roar.
"Ah...... CHOO!"
The all-sweeping gale blew back outward once more, ripping grass and trees to shreds — and the several mages scrambling for cover were smashed against the great trees in the distance, blood spilling from their mouths, faces white, breath going out but not coming in, plainly not long for this world.
Yet in that moment between life and death, they beheld a greater terror still.
The earth trembled; the mountain itself broke apart; everywhere the eye could reach, the ground heaved and the peaks shook.
And it was then that a snake's head, vast beyond all measure, burst up out of the earth.
A pair of vertical pupils swept across everything between heaven and earth.