For a generation the tribe has lived in the meadow. The grass is soft. The stream is slow. The old chief taught that to want little is to be good. He taught that the strong owe kneeling to the weak. He called this peace. He died smiling. The tribe wept and agreed to remain small forever.
You are the new chief. On the night of your ascension the Wise Man came down from the white rocks with ash in his beard. He spoke before the whole tribe:
"I have read the sign. Hear now what the old books kept. In the first age our fathers held the fire on the peaks. Fire in the hands of the strong is light and law. Each generation carried it lower, because the valleys were easier, and the meadow was easiest of all. Here we set it loose in the grass to warm our feet, and we forgot that it was a god. A god put to kitchen work goes down into the deep and gathers wrath. Now it rises under the meadow to take back its own. This is the judgment: we let the fire spread because tending it was hard, and what a people lets slip, that thing returns as its master. In thirty days this grass will be a lake of flame. One road remains: down through the valley, through the drowned marsh, then up the mountain, to the summit where the air is hard and clean. There we take up the fire again as its keepers. The tribe that arrives will be something greater."
The tribe murmured that the meadow had always been kind. That is the sickness you must cure while you march.
The tribe begins with its whole heart set on Harmony. That heart must be broken open.