When Giants Wake
It must have been around the 14th Era that the first Giants awoke. Through wind-stifled clefts of weed-twisted ground caved a small ridge of barren, wasted ugliness-a monument of hot desert sand, a collection of dust pinpricks, and a sorry collection of roots that passed as flowers. On some nights when the moon is merciful you can still pass by to scoop up one of those shriveled petals and blow a blessing at the wasted flower, though as soon as you’re done it’s likely to slip from your hands and crumble into nothingness. Those flowers of Isikara are prized things, to be sure, a testimony to the time where the Giants roamed free.
They came upon the first dawn, though the men of the town Daya knew them as a different species: Kevlin. Dressed as men their seven-toed shells cracked the ground with such force despite their humble eight-foot stature, disappointingly mundane to the mythical tales of sky-soaring reach. Yet they came all the same, and it was in that little town of Daya that blood and frost were first breathed into man.
At first they seemed to be kind, gentle creatures. Much like men they had skin of almost delicate clay, their eyes rounded pits of nearly-emotionful eyes, webs of fingers attached to an icy covering of flowing weaves that estranged their whole body. What differences they shared were mostly covered by their strange garb-night black tunics, heavily ordenated cloaks carved of cloth unknown to our world, and boots that were so large they engulfed whatever abnormal atrocities hid inside. Their tongue contrastingly was soft, quiet, like the peaceful droning of summer bees. So was it that in hindsight the men, out of mutual fear and respect, gave these god-like entities a place by their hearths, that they taught them to string harps and pluck cherries, to pull back monumental bows and scrape the rust off a bloodied sword. To wash dishes, cook meat, to roam the wilderness and make it their own. They did these things out of grim necessity, much as one offers a rabbit to a rabid, starving cougar to avoid becoming prey themselves, but never did they show the Giants where their own homes were, and never did they invite them, and if they kept their actual battle warfare to themselves, well, who could blame them? Gods these men were worshiped as, but gods are also fickle creatures, known to be just as likely to stomp on an ant as to shelter it. It didn’t seem to matter to the Giants. Peaceful and calm-though they never told their own stories, or taught their own tongues, or explained the dark, glistening trails that had followed them that first day upon arriving. Content to stay in mens’ favor they washed and cooked and cleaned lines, learning how to track and to hunt and to sing and fetch. Eventually a slow and grudging trust built within the two species…and perhaps that’s where the tale started.
They carried no names, these beautiful, gentle creatures. Sometimes they would confer in their small, trilling tongue, but though they learned human tongue they never actually took to speaking it. Never did they take off their cloaks of solid night, either, or the boots or the cloth of such fine stitches…and they seemed to have a particular affliction to the sun. Never did they sleep, or eat, or drink, or dismiss themselves. Never did they even seem to blink, though this difference was the least disconcerting feature about them. By slouching they could easily imitate men, and in the night sentires would often shout in the night in startled surprise.
After a time the men of Daya began to trust the Giants with larger tasks. Their fear turned into a slow and tepid greed, a cautious realization of the weapons given to them, still too scared to sharpen the blades yet eager still to hone them. The Giants, the Kevlin, stretched out in rings to surround woodland creatures, to kill them and take them back to their woodside camps. They traded with the Dayains, and it wasn’t long before they were fighting beside them too. When the Dayains were taken by surprise from the rear end of camp by a neighboring city state they were thrown into a quick, bloodthirsty slaughter-only it wasn’t the Dayains that ended up splattered across the rocks. The Giants, with their calm, methodical ease, stripped the invaders of their right to life, plunging into them wicked steel and barbed points though it was not necessary. One Giant simply crushed a man’s skull with his fist; as the body fell limp, the others screamed and begged and fought to flee. Their attempts were fruitless. Blood drenched foam waves across hungry sands and even the Dayains-a hard folk themselves-were set unease by the still-peaceable approach of the Giants, unknowing or uncaring of the massacre spread behind them, the gruesome and callous and slow murdering rather than simply taking the life itself. That was the first time they used violence. Perhaps it is more likely that it was the first time the Dayains saw them use violence.
Then came a man. A traveling villager from distant shores, he called himself a bard of significant means. When he first laid eyes on the giants they nearly jumped out of his head, and he screamed himself bloody. “They are here!” He screeched. “The Reapers of Mankind! The Decayers of Hope! The Huntsmen of the Apocalypse!” He burst into a strange tongue, limbs twitching in the frenzied vigor of a possessed man, his wails unearthly. As sentries spilled out from the undergrowth to calm him a different man got there first. Strangely tall, with haunched, rounded shoulders, he slashed a crude rapier through the bard’s throat in a single thrust. The words felled immediately, yet even with a gash in his throat the bard took a time to die. “They come!” He hissed as he died. “They…they come…no! No! They are already here!” And he slipped to the ground like a dull rock. The men formed a helpless circle around him, whispering and conversing and debating whether to question the man. Before they could reach a conclusion the sentry, wrapped in an unnaturally dark uniform, simply turned and strode off. There was not a speck of blood on his neat, precise uniform, or his abnormally large boots.
After that incident everything seemed to change. As if some malignant evil had presented itself as vengeance for the bard’s death, storm clouds would often crowd the horizon, blackening the sky with dark strips in between flares of smoking lightning. Rain thudded against weakly-supported sheds and some homes were crushed entirely below the weight of a rolling canopy of wind. The Giants seemed eerily affected by these strange winds, would emerge from their deep clefts and stand outside, still as stone and silent as them, looking up at the rain with emotionful, nearly-human eyes. Whatever they saw in that storm they did not share, for after that roused a settled tension between the two camps. Over time the distance stretched and grew and the men grew more anxious than relieved. If a predator disappeared without reason or cause, after all, then the most likely place it had gone to was your back. A few days later, as heavy, torrentful rains came and went, they were proven right. From the thunder emerged cackling flares of booming lightning-and with them, screaming. The men rushed to face the intruders, only to realize in sickened horror that it was their own men that were slick in blood and bone. Their eyes were white and glazed with such terror that the men backed away rather than look for the instigators of the attack. Whatever those men had seen in the storm they did not share, either. Only the rasping wind knew, and the thick claps of thunder, and to the men of Daya it very nearly sounded like laughter. It seemed like only a few days after that a strange dzz filled the air with the coming of rain. Thick storm clouds and an aggressive wind filled the air with sweet tension, that a low grinding sound promised an earthquake of powerful size wrought with fury and pain to come tumbling down, an agonized torment of rolling boulders falling from the sky like knives from their cushioned place of mountainside cleft. No, it is true that in this desert wasteland no mountains have stationed, nor could they if they had wanted to. You can understand then, just how shocked the Dayains were as they looked up and saw the mounds falling down like large, distorted drops of rain, upheaving the world into pieces and parts like shards of wrecked pottery. Screams filled the air like sawdust as a thousand-as a million people fell as the rocks heaved downwards, breaking skulls, limbs, and lives. It seemed to last a small eternity that the slaughter of the entire Dayains was complete, and perhaps it was a mercy that they did not see, between claps of thunder and the crashing of red rains, wash ashore those fumbling rocks twisting configuratively into the twisted shape of almost-man. From the earth converged those almost-men, naked to the eye without familier black cloaks to cover their grotesque and revolting bodies, any human resemblances shed in the safe cover of weeping sky. Were there human eyes to see them, they would be subject to the twisting of flesh and bone, the merging of stone into cracked lines and hard angles, the needle-like teeth fluctuating into the warm bite of daggers. Were they there to witness, they would have noticed that once the figures had stood from the blood-sated earth the rains yielded way to a clouded shine. The figures rambled into glacier-rock crevices, naked skin smoldering in the light of the sun without the protection of their cloaks. Their thorn-like lips moved like the droning of summer bees, a dzzz, dzzz, dzzz, a language unified in mournful chaos as they merged into the rockface once more. The sunlight stretched and expanded, grew tight until it was close to bursting, then lasered down on the sand-packed ground where barren rock gave way under the hurdle of a thousand droning hisses.
There is little left of that place. Weeds scrape at root and wilting flowers twist and snag around unsuspecting feet. There are no mountains and never will be this close to the desert, yet sometimes if you tilt your head you can almost hear a faint grinding sound, as if a thousand rocks are about to crash upon your head. The whole sky seems to shimmer in heated anticipation, and tension bleeds the ground dry. It is here that I bury my fingers into the ground and start to dig. For I was led here, you see, to this place of lost and ancient secrets. Led to by vicious dreams of falling rain steepling rivers red, of mountains carving themselves into deserts where they cannot possibly fit, of men and monster alike screaming in tongues that are too different and too similar to compare with anything around in modern times. I heard them, those far and distant cries, and some unsated hunger has led me to this place, this graveyard of the little town once known as Daya. It’s starting to rain a bit, and the clouds have emerged thick with forbidden suspense. In the middle of summer desert rains are as rare as fish breached ashore…and yet they have grown around me, like a slow and trickling vine about to squeeze around my neck. My feet find a place in the ground to root and I bend to my knees. It’s hard to believe there was anything here at all; there are no houses, no settlements, no people. In these cursed lands toils only the memories, the storms their begotten voice, the wind their fingers.
Suddenly my hands touch something that is not dirt. My fingers unearth a trembling circle, a relic from long ago, dealing with a matter that I have no business dealing with.
And it’s in that horrible, cracked, wilted shell that I find an unaccountable terror. Realizing that the little, trembling shift of sand and dirt and skin is moving, I let out a bloodthirsty howl that the heavens above must have heard.
And for all of our sakes I hope they did, for nothing could compare to the sheer fear I felt in that one moment, that shattering sense of warped logic and apathy. The Reapers of Mankind, the Decayers of Hope, the Huntsmen of the Apocalypse-they are still among us.