Filgerran II has worn the Güli crown for more than two hundred years, which among giants is long but not unheard of. A Güli king does not command the clans. He arbitrates their disputes, recites the lineages that settle questions of precedence, leads them in the rare wars worth fighting, and speaks for the Breidlheiss Basin to the small folk beyond it. The clans obey their own elders first and their king second, and for two centuries Filgerran was content with the arrangement.
Lately he is less content. Camaran's mining crews push further into the Egül foothills each season and answer Güli reprisals with expeditions of their own, claiming the giants hold no title to land they have grazed since before Camaran had a name. Filgerran has begun to wonder aloud whether his people have grown soft in their long peace. He has not yet called the clans to war. The lowland frontier understands that if he does, the foothill towns will not hold, which is why the question of what an old and restless king decides has quietly become the most consequential politics in the basin's reach.