The story did not begin in an ancient council.
Nor in the midst of a deafening war cry.
It began on the edge of the lowlands, around a miserable campfire. The fire was small, fed with damp branches that gave off muffled cracks. The smoke smelled of rancid fat and dried blood. The shadows of those gathered twisted grotesquely across the rocks as, in the center of the circle, an Epsilon champion was dragged back.
He could not stand on his own. Two warriors held him by the shoulders while the tips of his feet carved two crooked trails through the earth. He had once been a monumental warrior, respected in the battles of the steppe.
Now, he could barely keep his eyelids open.
The mana that had once coursed through his flesh seeped from his pores like icy vapor, unable to sustain his shattered muscles. On his forehead, precisely where the human's blade had grazed his skin, a deep, blackened mark remained.
It neither bled nor healed.
"What happened?" a voice asked from the darkness.
The champion took several long seconds to answer. He breathed with brutal difficulty, his throat raw with every breath.
"The mountain..."
Several warriors leaned forward, their jaws tightening.
"What did it do?"
The champion swallowed bitterly.
"It moved."
That was all.
At first.
He spoke neither of coordinated ambushes nor of a rain of arrows. He did not speak of the face of a warrior.
He only repeated a single thought, his gaze lost in the embers:
"The ground grabbed me."
That night, the human did not even have a name. He did not exist as a flesh-and-blood enemy. To them, it was the mountain itself that had passed judgment.
And so, around that smoking campfire, the first myth was born:
The Territory That Responds.
But the story did not remain intact for long.
It passed from mouth to mouth through the camps, and each side added its own measure of darkness.
The younger hunters began whispering that a figure emerged directly from the darkness of the trees. That the shadows themselves fanned outward to let him pass. That there was no need to hear him approaching to know he was already behind you.
Some swore that the shadow obeyed his will like a loyal pack. Others claimed that the champion had fallen with his body torn apart without the human's blade ever touching him.
The Mother Tree ceased to be perceived as a mere sprout of vegetation.
It became an ancestral spirit.
Then a bloodthirsty god.
Then a titanic creature that awakened the precise moment a stranger stepped into its domain.
And the human...
The human was no longer a mere soft-skinned invader.
"He was raised by the cursed earth," they said at the watchposts.
"No. He was born from the bowels of the rock."
"They say he feeds on the darkness he drains from our people."
The young ones laughed nervously when they repeated those stories across the savanna.
They laughed...
but none dared climb the slope.
And when they did, it was only in small groups, merely to prove to themselves that they weren't afraid.
In the ancient councils, however, the legend was received with a different kind of coldness.
The clan elders did not ask how many had died during the incursion, nor did they bother investigating how they had been defeated.
They asked something far more unsettling:
"Was the air at the summit easy to breathe?"
When the survivors confirmed that the mana there was dense and pure, no one spoke for a long while.
Those who had lived through enough cycles remembered the old scriptures.
They knew what such an anomaly meant: lands that, after cataclysms or the fall of ancient monsters, began drawing the surrounding mana toward their center. Places where plants multiplied in size, where beasts grew fat within weeks, and where great predators eventually arrived, drawn by the abundance.
It was not a divine curse.
It was territory.
And territory represented absolute power.
Because where mana accumulated...
strength grew.
And where strength grew...
dominion was inevitable.
The mountain was no longer seen as a conceptual enemy.
It was the most coveted resource in the region.
The human, meanwhile, remained a technical problem to be solved.
However, the most recent versions of the story introduced a detail that chilled the blood of the leaders.
"They say he didn't kill all of them on purpose."
"Why would he leave survivors?"
The answer was always spoken in the lowest voice inside the tent:
"To make them return. So they could tell the others what lies above."
That was how true fear took root in the savanna.
Not fear of the human's brute strength, but of the relentless idea that the mountain had eyes.
The certainty that you could cross the boundary believing yourself to be an invisible hunter...
and end up dissolving into the darkness without leaving a trace.
Some clans altered their usual hunting routes.
Others established their expeditions leagues away from the northern slopes.
And the most suspicious stopped releasing mana pulses while tracking, as though hiding their presence could prevent the shadow from detecting them from the summit.
It was not devotion.
It was the pure caution of prey.
As the days passed, the stories continued to contradict one another.
Some spoke of a calamity in human form.
Others, of a guardian chosen by the ancestral forest.
But every version agreed on one unavoidable truth:
The mountain was no longer empty.
And as the animals of the lowlands began raising their heads toward the verdant slopes, drawn by the trail of concentrated mana, a phrase began spreading like a proverb among the tribes.
First among the border hunters.
Then among the elders of the council.
And finally, among the mothers who tried to keep their young away from the north:
"Where a forest grows upon stone..."
They would pause, holding their breath.
"...the savanna loses ground."
It was not open hatred yet.
Total war had not yet been declared.
But the entire savanna had begun to understand the magnitude of the threat.
The true danger was not that humans had taken refuge on the summit.
The true danger was that the mountain was beginning to devour everything around it.