“Fire’s burning low, Uluntai. Go fetch some more wood before it dies. Don’t want to spend another ten minutes watching you all try to light a new one in this wind.”

“Yes, Revered Master”, the scout said, pulling his cloak tighter around his body with one hand as he pushed himself to his feet with the other. “I’ll need but a moment.”

The Master, wizened, wrinkled and greyed by the passage of untold lifetimes, poked at the dwindling fire with the butt of his cane, stirring the ashen mess and surfacing those few bits of wood which had yet to fully catch alight. Though time and previous hardship had largely deadened him to the freezing northerly wind, he found comfort in the light of the dancing flame and the smell of woodsmoke. The others, however, especially the southerners of the group, were in dire need of the fire’s warmth. They had all ridden many days without pause, and after the exertion of the morning’s fight, their weakened bodies were more vulnerable than ever to exposure.

“Revered Master,” asked one of the younger disciples between convulsive shivers, a bald-headed man in the saffron-dyed robes of a monk, “You saw how today’s hunt went. It took fifty of us to bring down two of them, and we lost a dozen warriors and their mounts. Our arrows, though accurate and sharp, are but pinpricks to their looming bodies. Our warhorses, the terror of the steppes and the finest of all nations, are little more than mouthfuls for them, to say nothing of the warriors astride them. Even when we had them mired in mud, they were still so fast...”

“Yes, I saw. You all did very well. We’ll toast to all those who have fallen back at Ordonbaliq, and speak at length of the heroism they showed here. Our foes are mighty, but they are few… and so victories such as this must be appreciated.”

“But Master,” the monk continued, his expression troubled, “I don’t understand. How is it that it takes 60 trained warriors astride fine coursers to slay two of the giants? You were alive during the Wars of Foundation; how did we manage to destroy thousands of them?”

The Revered Master stopped stirring the flame for a moment, ruminating on the monk’s question. After a hushed pause, the Master looked around the fire. All eyes were on him.

“Yes… yes, we did win those wars. But not because we fared any better in battle - do not mistake our victory for a sign of our superiority on the field. For every giant we felled, dozens, better trained than you lot - though this is a fault of my own - were trampled into the ground. For every city we leveled, entire tumens of eager warriors were decimated… but it was not on the battlefield that the fate of the conflict was decided. We poisoned their wells and granaries, set fire to their forests and fields, poached their huge beasts to extinction with traps. Still, it was strange to see such powerful beings emaciated and on the verge of death, their bodies littering the streets of their gargantuan cities. Soon, they started to fight among themselves over what little food was left.”

The others at the fire listened with bated breath, eyes wide as they listened to the Master’s words. As an esteemed healer and shaman, his lifetime prolonged many times over by restorative magic, he was one of very few alive who had witnessed with his own eyes the war against the giants. The smell of blood and smoke in the air, the neighing of terrified horses, the screams and sobs of the wounded and dying… such things are not easily forgotten, this they knew from their own battles against the other nations of men. Nonetheless, the Master knew that there was no use in trying to explain the unfathomable scale of the death and destruction wrought by the War to those who had not seen it.

“Regardless of what we did then, there are no cities left to starve out,” he gruffly concluded, putting down his walking stick as Uluntai returned with a new bundle of firewood, “nor nations to pit against each other, nor fields to burn and sow with salt. They have grown craftier in their desperation, and in robbing them of their old sources of food, we traded a great victory for a small misfortune that nobody, at the time, at least, could have imagined. The wars were brutal beyond all measure, with no pity given nor received, but it was only in this time that they started eating manflesh with such terrifying regularity. Now, I doubt there’s a giant still alive that hasn’t turned to eating people. And to your point, my disciple: even if all of us died today to bring down these two most recent interlopers, that is a worthy sacrifice indeed, for every day that they live is another day that they must fill their gullets with the defenseless.”

“Your wisdom is beyond reproach, Revered Master,” the monk replied, bowing his head in respect and deference. “I will never question our sacred duty again.”

“Do not be afraid to ask questions,” the Master answered, his gentle smile illuminated from below as he leaned closer to the fire, “so long as you are willing to hear the answer you receive, and learn from it. None of us are born with knowledge, but now you understand the importance of our duty: while there is even a single giant in our lands, the lands of the Ulug Orda, the wild steppes which raised us, we cannot rest. The complacency of the Khan cannot forestall this great labour, and so it falls to the all-thousands of our Heavenly Order to rip them from their caves and hovels, and water the grazing plains with their blood. Now let’s eat so we can continue riding onward - we have another foe to vanquish, one perhaps even worse than these giants. I hope you have all made the most of our short rest here - the hardest battle awaits us still.”

◉ ◉ ◉

Liese shivered in the cold wind which blew incessantly between the sad, stunted trees of the Northreach. With the trees getting more and more sparse as she drew further from the forest, there was little to shield her from the freezing winds blowing down from the ocean, a problem that only grew worse as winter approached. Though her current clothing of linen and hempen cloth was barely sufficient for keeping her warm in the day, it was woefully inadequate during the freezing nights. Sheepskin, leather, and wool were luxuries she rarely saw in the infrequent barters she was able to make with other humans, and so handmade garments of spun plant thread were what most had to make do with. 

“Gods, maybe this is a mistake…” Liese muttered to herself, wrapping her arms around each other in a vain attempt to ward off the wind and muster some lasting body heat. “It might be easier just dealing with the tomkins.”

Tomkins, vermin, the little ones, tinies, smallfolk… all different monikers for the same little creatures, small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand… or under the flat of one’s foot. Liese’s face scrunched into a scowl just thinking about them. They looked like people, talked like them - though in their own tongue - and, seemingly, had all the same emotions and complexities, but were absolutely miniature, standing around the height of her outstretched pointer finger. Liese had seen more than enough to know that any dream of coexistence or negotiation was futile. She had occasionally encountered their armed patrols in the past, and remembered well the sting of their arrows and the bite of their blades… but far more than this, she remembers their taste. The Northreach was never plentiful with food, nor was the aptly named Rainless Land to the south. In a good season, while the forests and hills were hardly replete with forage, there was enough to build a decent larder for the winter. All it took was one dry spell, one wildfire, or one too early or too late frost to ruin that, and in such times, there was but one reliable, inexhaustible food source.

Liese’s mind drifted to the first time she ate a tomkin as she hiked onward through the thinning forest. She remembered looking at the tears running down the face of the pleading little man she was given, how he clasped his hands together and babbled, no doubt, a prayer to his gods or a plea for supplication, how her mother tried to explain that she had to eat something, that there was no other food, that he had to die anyhow. Even after she had summoned the courage to gulp the man down, she spent the rest of the night in her cot fighting nausea. After this first memory, however, the faces and events blurred in her mind. Sometimes her mother or older sister would come home with a bunch of disarmed soldiers, the prize of a hard-won fight, but more often than not it was not the hardened visages of soldiers that stared at her from her mother’s wicker basket, but the terrified, tearful faces of villagers. One day of eating tomkins quickly passed into a week, then a month, and by the end of the winter, Liese had come to quite enjoy them over most other provisions.

Now, however, she had borne the consequences of such a subsistence. The first warning was an by scouting parties, but these Liese had seen before. They were easy enough to outrun, especially in the denser parts of the forest, but the clearest indicator of what lay ahead came only a little later: one day, Liese’s mother simply didn’t come back. In their vain attempt to find her, Liese and her two siblings found instead a confirmation of their worst fears: an army in the hundreds of thousands proceeded through the forest from west to east, intent on the destruction of the forest and all humans within. Unwilling to give up but incapable of facing such a prodigious force, the three fled from the army. The steppelands to the east were frigid and inhospitable in the late autumn, but Benno said they wouldn’t have to be here for long. One could hope.

“They stole everything, and settled it atop our bones,” Liese murmured, repeating what her mother had told her many times over the years, “but when the world gets tough, you just need to get tougher.”

As the forest almost fully thinned out, Liese was elated to see, in the distance, the river where she was to meet her brother and sister. They had traveled ahead to forage for extra provisions, tomkins or not, while she recuperated from a mild illness in the somewhat warmer forest. Though Heike, her sister, had wanted to stay with her until she was well enough to travel once more, her brother Benno had insisted that it was wiser for the two of them to forge ahead while Liese recovered, gathering food and setting up a camp instead to make up for lost time. Liese, not wanting to be a burden, naturally agreed.

“We’ll meet by the mouth of the river, where it flows into the Adiscarr Lake,” Heike had said before departing, putting a gentle hand on Liese’s shivering shoulder, “I know you can make it. The tomkins are sweeping the forest, but it’ll take them time. We’ve probably put three or four days’ worth of their travel between us, so you have some time, but… don’t stray too long. You got all that, sis?”

Here it was. Liese stood before the river, which gullied down a gentle incline into a tranquil, shimmering lake, surrounded by soft banks of silty loam and tall reedgrass. Beyond this river, there was only the open plain, untameable and vast, its end not in sight. She had hoped to see a fire somewhere, or at the very least some visual indication of where Heike and Benno had set up camp, but no such marker was visible.

“Of course you’re making me walk all around the lake to find you. I guess it’s probably safer not to have a fire going in such open terrain, but it’s so cold… I hope you two have at least found something for me to eat.”

Liese felt her stomach complain again. She’d been out to the steppelands before, and knew that it wasn’t entirely bereft of natural forage, from wild onions and garlic to edible flower bulbs to the very occasional hare that hadn’t already been nabbed by itinerant poachers. She hoped that a good assortment of these awaited her.

Reaching the lake, Liese knelt over the bank, her knees sinking into the soft mud as she lowered herself, and looked into the water. Her gaze was met by the powder blue eyes of her reflection, distorted and wobbling in the wind-disturbed waters. 

“...Ugh.”

Her face fell as she got a clearer look at herself. Her short, raven-black hair, messily cropped at her neck by her own hand, was riddled with bits of forest detritus. Her face was besmirched with dirt-turned-mud by the rivulets of sweat coming from her brow, which in turn made the biting cold all the worse. Cupping some of the frigid lake water in her hands, Liese splashed her face and tried scrubbing away some of the dirt, with moderate success. The band of freckles that crossed the bridge of her nose were now visible, as were the fatigued dark circles under her eyes. Her thin lips, normally the dull pink of an unripe peach, had a faint blue tinge to them, no doubt attributable to the cold and her recent illness. Though colder, not feeling quite so grimy was an overall improvement. After cupping more water and drinking her fill, Liese stood back up, pulling her knees one at a time from the suction of the muddy bank, and continued trudging around the lake’s perimeter. It was getting dark, and she didn’t want Heike and Benno worrying about her… but where could they be?

The smell was the first thing she noticed; the unmistakably metallic, dry tang of blood.

“No,” she uttered, the word falling from her lips before she realized she’d even said it. “No, no, no…”

Yet there was no questioning what she saw next. From behind a clump of reeds, a bloodied leg, feathered with miniature arrows. Liese scrambled forward, slipping in the mud, and pushed the lakegrass to the side. Her lip trembled as she tried to suppress a scream.

Riddled with arrows and little wounds, their splayed forms mutilated and stained with sanguine, the bodies of Heike and Benno were face down in the lake mud. Stumbling the rest of the distance over and kneeling above one of the bodies, Liese reached out to flip her over, her slender hands trembling uncontrollably as she did so. When she was met with the lifeless, blank stare of her sister, Liese tried to call forth another cry of anguish, a guttural wail that would rip the air from her lungs forever, but her voice simply did not come. Her arms wrapped around her knees as she fell on her side, drawing herself in squeezing her eyes shut, gasping for air in ragged, choked breaths. 

Soon, however, something brought a halt to the eruption of her grief. Welling up from within, more violently than ever her sorrow, was her rage. This could not go unpunished; of this much Liese was certain, and the blood was fresh… pushing herself back up, she forced herself to look back to the scene. The clues were evident enough once she was able to bring herself to search for them: a multitude of miniature equine tracks led away from the scene, and some of the squashed stains in the mud seemed just a bit too large to be from a tomkin alone: a mounted party did this, and one of substantial size. There were hoofprints in the hundreds overlapping each other, leading further north.

“I will come back, brother, sister. I will not let them leave you like this forever… I will not let them leave at all. For now... wait... please. Please...”

Pushing herself back up with trembling arms, she started following the tracks left by the tomkins as they left. As she walked, clouded though her mind was with violently strong emotion, she still understood that what she was doing now was likely taking her to her end: if Heike and Benno fell so easily, what hope did she, the shortest and most waifish of the three, have of avenging them? Even if she caught the perpetrators in their sleep and emerged victorious, she’d be hungry, exhausted, alone, and lost even further in the emptiness of the northern grasslands. 

◎ ◎ ◎

“Gods above and below, curse you!”  Issara screamed, ducking just before a flaming arrow whizzed through the window of her tower. She felt the heat of the flame-wreathed tip as it sailed over her head and plunked itself into the bookshelf behind her, setting it and its contents alight. She felt her heart sink as the pages of the priceless tomes withered and blackened in the spreading tongues of fire. Cautiously peeking from the window again, her heart sank further as she saw the state of affairs outside.

Everywhere, her skeletal retainers clashed with the raiding holy warriors, and it seemed that everywhere, they were having the worst of the fight. One by one, they were picked off by the arrows and lances of the mounted warriors, but had little opportunity to strike back before the last rider had galloped off and next charged.

Facing her staff toward one of the riders, Issara tapped into its stored magical reserves, her body’s mana already sapped by the loss of so many thralls. Winter would be setting in soon, and a strong wind from the north carried the cold with it. It was a good night for ice magic, at least. With a sound like shattering glass, a thin ray of frost projected itself from the gaping maw of the skull tipping her staff, lancing through the lamellar armor of the rider it hit and, presumably, through his heart.

“That’s one…” Issara muttered, pausing to quench the fire consuming her archives with another frost ray. “Come on, Rüdiger! Hurry back home before they burn the rest of my book collection! They’ve already trampled the gardens, the brutes!”

If she hadn’t sent the pinnacle of her necromantic collection off to a distant watering hole to search for herbs, Issara doubted that she’d have much trouble in dispelling the unwanted intruders, but in its absence, she could not help but worry. She’d transmitted the command to return at the moment she saw the riders gathered at the horizon, but she had no idea how long it’d take for her favorite tool to return to her. In the meantime, all that stood between her and the small mob set on burning her were some old bones with rusty spears and a few flights of stairs.

Singling out another rider, Issara unleashed another jet of cold, crackling rimefrost, again with perfect accuracy. Instead of blowing through the warrior’s armor and encasing his heart with ice, however, the bolt was dashed to nothingness as a wall of grass sprung up in front of the intended victim in a burst of spontaneous growth, blocking the spell and sparing the rider. Issara’s gaze snapped to the source of the magical energy that had contested her own, and felt her panic rise yet further still. Watching the battle from an overlooking peak, hands raised in the air in a textbook channeling pose, was one of the nomads’ shamans. A painted wooden mask in likeness of a snarling demon obscured his face, but she needed only to see his eyes to know the smug condescension of the grin that lay beneath.

“Bastard!” she growled, focusing on this newest and most alarming threat. A handful of her skeletons managed to break through the loose circle of the horse archers and charge the shaman, only to be ensnared and pulled to pieces by the roots of the plants of Issara’s alchemical garden. 

As the last of her skeletons were cut down and the riders started to dismount, Issara started rifling through the artifacts atop her desk, speaking aloud to herself as she did so.

“Alright, Issy, calm down! You have something. You know you have something. What’s the point of having all this junk around if you don’t have something for this, right? Let’s see… no, no, this is no good… a potion! A… a love potion? What the fuck would I ever need a love potion for? I knew I should have replaced the teleportation scroll I used last time! Fuck! RÜDIGER!”

Issara swept the mess of bottled vials and glowing trinkets from the desk in frustration as she saw the warriors outside manage to barge down the door to the tower. It would take them some time to ascend the stairs, and there were a handful more skeletons inside, but it was only a matter of time before they reached the summit, and with it, Issara.

“Should have, could have, whatever… they’re going to burn me alive and parade my toasted body through the horseshit-clogged streets of their city. Accursed tribals.”

Issara looked out of the window again, but any thoughts of jumping to her freedom were quashed when she saw that the shaman, still astride his pearl-colored mount, had not moved an inch, and still looked at her with the same intensity. Even if she survived the dizzying jump, healed her broken legs after the fall, and took off running without the soldiers in the tower knowing, the shaman would ride her down, and with her mana depleted as it was, Issara knew she had no chance of winning the magical duel that would ensue.

“Never thought they’d find me here…” she muttered, resting her elbows on the window and taking one last look at the early night sky. The constellations above twinkled with the same cold, impassive light that they always did, aloof and uncaring to the world they hung so high above. Issara was ready to face whatever came next, at the very least, with her dignity intact. She would not lower herself to pleading against the ignorance of mortals.

As she looked out to the night, the sound of dozens of boots against stone growing louder with every floor the warhost ascended, a sudden spark of hope ignited in Issara’s heart as she saw something large in the distance lumbering ever closer.

“Rüdiger?” she queried, staring quizzically. She longed for it to be true, but all signs were pointing to no: she would feel the magical energy coming from any one of her thralls if it was close enough to see. This was not anything of hers. Towering like one of the giants, gaunt and thin, savage and hateful in its demeanor, the spectre was not entirely what she had imagined Death to look like, but in seeing it, Issara found herself certain that she saw none other than Death in the distance, striding towards her to whisk her off to whatever limbo awaited the stained soul of a necromancer. It was a particularly vivid hallucination. There was a certain savagery and hunger to Death, after all… and perhaps, a beauty? As her end drew ever closer, she could even hear its ragged breathing and the power behind its footfalls, but above this, she could make out strikingly blue eyes, black and luscious hair, and a trim but distinctly feminine build. Would Death really look so… alive?

Issara laughed at herself for taking a panicked hallucination so seriously. There were no ghosts on the horizon. She of all people knew just how fragile the mind was in the moments before its extinguishing… but something felt off.

The shaman had finally stopped meeting her gaze, and stared, instead, at the spectre. That couldn’t be right… right?

“REGROUP AND REMOUNT!” the shaman belted, the force of his voice amplified by magic. “FORM UP INTO TWO WINGS, WIND FORMATION!”

The tramping of boots, now no further away than the floor below Issara, paused a moment before resuming, this time growing quieter as the warriors descended the stairs of the tower. Taking another look at the “spectre”, Issara now instead saw a furious young woman, her tear-streaked face drawn tight in an expression of unfettered malice. Giant though she was, this was no Death.

“I could kiss that giantess. Fate is not yet done with Issara, you scoundrels! Now come on, Rüdiger, she’ll buy us a bit more time… hurry up!” 

Issara watched as the first of the warriors started to trickle out of the tower and mount their steeds… only for the foot of the giantess to slam down in not even twenty paces in front of the suddenly disorganized host. Issara had never yet seen the bloody handiwork of a living giant firsthand, but she had the feeling it would be quite the spectacle, so long as she wasn’t caught in it.