The Carthians were a fierce and independent people. Hidden away in the mountains, no one could hope to conquer them, and scarcely anyone had ever bothered trying.
In times like these Groat couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t that attitude that had caused the problem. It was all well and good without anyone else to fuck you over, but perhaps it would be worth it to get some help in times like these.
Groat snorted as he raised his flask to his lips. Oh, who was he kidding. He’d traveled in his youth, seen more of the world than ten other men. You could suck up to a lord all your life and that wouldn’t mean diddly when you needed them.
That was why he’d come home in the first place. A better place to live out his last days he couldn’t imagine. A lush little vale, a lake bluer than a summer sky and rivers brimming with freshwater mussels. Why on a good day you could reach in and pluck out a full meal without half trying.
The good days were over. Groat sighed and shimmied against the hull, trying to get comfortable. A good day wouldn’t have a dozen cockleshells all dragged inland as nothing more than a glorified backstop for a lazy old drunk.
Groat slouched further against the hull, vibrations in the mud helping him sink even lower. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was supposed to waltz on in, a veteran adventurer retiring to become the biggest fish in a little pond.
An ironic turn of phrase, but there was no fish big enough to save them now. Heavens know he’d tried, first blum and bluster, then desperate appeals. Neither had helped. No one had seen a fish in weeks and there wasn’t a fisherman with the courage to try.
The ground shook.
Groat sat up straighter, blinking the film from his eyes. Had the beast finally seen fit to end their misery? He slapped his hand on the hull behind him and pulled himself upright. If the thing had emerged at least he could die on his feet. If he was lucky he’d pick back up a few crumbs of the respect his impotence had lost him.
Groat glared out at the waters he’d played in as a child, where he’d splashed his friends, dunked his brothers, where he’d become a man on moonlit waters. Even drunk, it hurt to see it like this. Even the beach was shadowed leading up to it.
Wait. Hadn’t those vibrations been coming from behind him?
Groat whirled, Stats smoothing over his drunken limbs just enough to find his sword hilt.
Groat’s heart barely managed to lurch itself into combat tempo before it froze again. He let his blade slide through limp fingers, falling back into a sheath it had scarcely been drawn from.
“What the hell are you?”
The stranger shrugged, massive shoulders rolling like two hills crashing together. Every inch of him was just as solid, bigger than any man Groat had ever seen or imagined seeing. He was tall such that even were Groat to stand atop the hull the stranger wouldn’t struggle to look him in the eye and broad enough that Groat would need to stretch his arms on a rack simply to embrace him and have one arm meet the other.
The stranger stepped around Groat’s side and half knelt half crouched as a father might to speak to his son. Groat’s view grew clearer without the back light of the sun, but his understanding didn’t. A better view only made the stranger grow stranger.
His skin was the color of beaten bronze, bone dry but still gleaming. Each hair across his body shone brighter than polished copper while his beard was a tangle of iron wires. Every inch of him had a luster, nay a presence, beyond mortal men.
What kind of Skills could make a man look like that?
The giant nodded at the lake and launching a series of complicated hand gestures.
Groat blinked. It had been a long time since he’d used delver’s cant, and he could scarcely even recognize it. “Er, its safe to talk? That thing can’t leave the lake.”
Groat shivered and clutched himself. “I hope.”
The giant patted him on the shoulder. He moved with a shocking gentleness for someone so obviously strong. Groat was ashamed at how reassuring he found the mans touch.
The giant made another hand sign, exaggerated and slowed, then pointed at the lake. This one was easily recognized, even if Groat had been retired for five times as long.
Any adventurer knew the sign for ‘danger’.
“There’s no danger here, none save starvation. It can’t seem to leave the lake, but ever since it arrived the fish have been disappearing and once it took old Mcnearsen… well that was the end of anyone trying.”
The giant looked over at the wreckage of Mcnearsen’s boat and nodded sympathetically.
Then he pointed at the boat.
“What?”
The giant pointed at the boat that Groat was leaning against, then to himself, then made another slowed hand sign. It was one of the more basic hand signs, the equivalent of a written question mark.
“You want the boat?”
The giant nodded.
“Weren’t you listening? Those boats are just a glorified platter for that thing, you can just walk around the lake if you want to reach the other side!”
The giant shook his head with a smile, then pointed down.
The madman didn’t want to go to the other side. He wanted to go to the bottom.
“Are you stupid? Can you breath underwater, or do you just want to kill yourself?”
The giant shrugged and inhaled. And inhaled.
And inhaled.
And inhaled.
The wind shifted, branches leaned towards him, waves formed across the still lake, all drawn into his all consuming maw. Groat seized the keel of the boat and hauled against the pull, only for the giant’s jaws to snap shut.
The giant puffed out his cheeks comically and thumped his unmoving chest.
“How does that fit!?”
The giant shrugged.
Fair enough. Groat wouldn’t explain any of his skills to a stranger, and none of his could do that.
“Tell you what. You take whatever boat you think can carry you.”
The giant gave him a sharp nod and stood. He seized the boat from under Groat, sending the smaller man stumbling to the side. Groat turned to see the giant striding down the rocky beach, thirty-foot boat tucked under one arm.
From the village a handful of people rushed towards Groat, casting nervous glances at the giant stranger. By the time they reached Groat the giant was ankle deep in the lake’s shadowy waters.
“Groat, what is the meaning of this.” Eldryn was the first to speak up.
“Has that thing got my boat!?” Melak was next, unsurprisingly.
“At least he is using it.”
Melak spat and sputtered, but Groat was only looking at the giant, and so was everyone else. The giant slid the boat into the water and stepped in with one foot in the center. It sank beneath his weight, water splashing at the edge of spilling into the boat. He thrust an oar against the ground and the boat shot forwards.
The normally tranquil blue water had become a black mirror with neither boat nor fish to break its surface.
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That changed now, as the giant ploughed out towards the center and sent ripples to every corner. His momentum slowed as the first ripples echoed back to him.
He anchored the oar in its mount and held fast to it as he leaned out over the side. The boat rolled with him, coming within inches of dipping under the water’s surface.
Melak ceased his sputtering. “How much does that fucker weigh? My girl was built to bear more than a single over-sized freak.”
It was true that she was built to carry Melak and his seven sons, sturdy men all, but Groat had grown from his travels.
Grown enough to see how far above him the giant stood still. If his weight was enough to break oak like cottonwood Groat would be far from surprised.
The giant lurched backwards, dodging a blur exploding from the depths. The boat lurched with him, going from the brink of capsizing in one direction to the other.
Nonetheless the giant responded smoothly, leaning against the tilt as he freed his oar and swung it around with a whip crack.
The wrist-thick ash oar splintered like a child’s toy as it hit the offending tentacle.
Groat blinked, even that instant long enough for the giant to catch the tentacle and ram the jagged oar shaft clean through it. No, Groat was sure, the oar had broken before impact. Was the giant really so mighty that such things were as brittle twigs to him?
The giant wrenched his oar to the side, sending a spurt of black blood across Melak’s boat even as wood failed him once again. Something thrummed as the injured tentacle shot back beneath the surface.
The giant tossed the shards of oar aside. The sound didn’t stop, only growing louder as the entire lake began to vibrate like a drum and cast up droplets of water in a fine black mist.
Distantly Groat realized it was a scream. Some vast titan had tasted pain for the first time and they had awoken its wroth.
The people around him paled as they realized the same thing. Groat had welcomed the aid secure in the knowledge that it could hardly get worse and in his hubris he had doomed them all.
“Get back to the village Melak.” The headman spoke with trembling words. “We need to flee while we still can.”
The other’s ran, kicking up sprays of dirt and gravel, but Groat stood still. He had no family to evacuate, no friends to save. He had to see how this would end.
As soon as the giant peered back over the edge a second tentacle lashed out. Groat opened his mouth to shout warning, but by the time his lips parted the tentacle had already wrapped around the giant’s neck.
It wound round the giant’s neck a dozen times, winding its way up from constricting the neck to smothering the face and eyes. Yet the giant had already stored away a veritable ocean of air, so surely this would not end the fight!
The tentacle yanked back on his neck to haul the giant over the side, but he swung his hips backwards. The entire boat was dragged along, getting in between him and the water again. Even so the boat sank by over a foot, raw strength sufficient to slowly overwhelm its buoyancy.
Not fast enough, as the giant reached around to grab the tentacle and squeezed. It exploded in his grasp like a fistful of jelly in the hands of an over excited child.
The boat lurched back upright, spraying water as the giant ripped the tentacle free and hurled it off to the side.
It was working, the giant could win—
The water stretched up around the boat forming a raised ring that broke to reveal jagged teeth snapping shut in a spray of foam. The boat cracked like lightning as it broke, folding like cheap paper as it sucked the giant deeper into a rising maw.
The beast shot upwards, boat and giant alike disappearing in an explosion of water and splinters. It turned down and crashed back into the depths from which it came. Midnight water blasted outwards, hitting Groat with a chest high wall and knocking him off his feet.
Groat tumbled backwards, head cracking against the gravel beach. He flipped himself upright, one hand on the disintegrating ground beneath him so his feet could find it. Pushing off it with every ounce of his stats catapulted him from the water.
The water was receding, leading back out to were a vast serpent writhed, curling back over itself as it dove back to its lake bed home.
Groat’s heart sunk in his gut. Or maybe that was gravity reasserting itself. As he hit the ground again he only had to splash through a foot of water to reach relatively solid gravel.
The water had only been enough to shift the gravel briefly, but the more buoyant boats were already floating out into the lake towards the center where the water was still rippling from the serpent’s descent.
Groat turned towards the village. The boats were useless already, even more so with the beast riled up. They could dream of staying before, but now they had to admit reality.
It was time to leave.
Groat sprinted down the beach, giving the waterline a healthy berth. The village would have been hit far lighter given its position, but he could already see some serious damage on the more lakefront buildings.
An explosion of water tossed Groat from his feet before he was halfway to the village. He rolled to his feet and kept running, one eye on the lake this time.
It was boiling.
Steaming bubbles rose from the center and a distant orange light flickered from deep within. The once still lake roiled, faint shadows of serpentine coils in the deep sent waves up across the lake.
Groat hurled himself forwards and up, sprinting all out for the village. If it was this angry already, then they didn’t have much time.
Groat skidded into the village center, casting up a spray of water ahead of him. The water was still ankle deep here, people’s possessions strewn across the street and the people stumbling out to retrieve them.
“Leave them!” Groat waved his arms as the confused and battered citizens turned to face him. “We can’t afford to waste time!”
“Easy enough for you to say you rat bastard!”
Groat turned to see Melak sloshing through the water towards him, flanked by all seven of his sons.
Groat raised his hands. “Can’t we do this after we evacuate?”
Melak stopped and put his hands on his hips, letting his sons continue on to flank Groat. “How could we, when this is your fault to begin with?”
“Dammit, you know that isn’t true.”
Melak leveled a single finger at Groat. “You let him take my boat.”
Groat threw out his hands. “This is about your boat?! Fuck your boat! We’re all gonna die and you wanna talk about a godsdamn boat?”
“And who’s fault is that Groat!? Who let the stranger rile up the beast?”
“Do you think I could have stopped him?”
“I don’t know, weren’t your big shot adventuring days good for anything?”
“Are you really so selfish that you’ll put lives at risk from spite?”
Melak’s face was going increasingly red. “Spite? This is justice.”
Groat felt the knife coming more than saw it, the splash of shifting water more than enough information to dive out of the way.
Groat skidded through the water and rolled to his feet with mud in his eyes. He spun to face his assailants, only to find the headman between them.
The old man held back the knife-wielding son with little more than will alone. His gnarled grip around the lead son’s arm was certainly not firm enough to truly restrain the lad.
The son, for his part, looked more concerned than threatened, trying to gently tug free his arm without hurting the headman.
The headman slapped him across the face. “Stop squirming brat!”
The burly young man froze, as if his own mother had caught him stealing sweets before dinner.
“And you Melak, don’t you know any better?! I told you to help evacuate, not waste time!”
Melak leveled a finger at Groat. “This bastard—”
“Do I look like someone who cares? Send your sons to help Lorry carry out what food we can save, and I need you to pry Greta out of her hut before she drowns in it.”
Melak hesitated, then gave a jerky, stilted nod. “You heard him boys.”
The headman turned to Groat as Melak’s brood broke up. “I need you to get to the belltower. I need early warning when the beast gets tired of mutilating that fools corpse and comes for us.”
Groat swallowed. “It might already be too late.”
The headman furrowed his brows and opened his mouth, then followed Groat’s gaze and saw the water running backwards.
His eyes widened. “Is it over?”
Groat grabbed the headman and leapt for the nearest house. “Take cover!”
Thoom.
People dove for doorways while the more agile leapt for the rooftops.
Thoom.
Melak’s third son picked up crone Elsea and threw her into the arms of his brother.
Thoom.
Groat looked over the pillar he’d hidden behind, the street plummeting down before him. At the bottom the lake loomed, a single shadow moving in the darkness.
Thoom.
“Let go of me you great big oaf!” The headman slipped out of Groat’s grasp and stumbled back into the center of the street.
Thoom.
The water broke like the skin of an overripe fruit, a dark bearded visage erupting from the water.
A mighty boot came down with a deafening thoom and the giant jerked another step forwards. He shifted his grip on the fleshy rope stretching over his shoulder and stepped again.
Again, and again, and again.
Slowly people stepped forth from their hiding places, children held back by their belts as they leaned over a roof’s edge and around corners to get a closer look. Each footstep buried itself in the earth such that you could scarcely envision it shifting only to rise and step again.
Step by thundering step the giant came forward, and step by thundering step he dragged his prey behind him. It broke the water ten paces behind him, a thing of razor teeth and glassy eyes, mouth lolling open in death. It’s bulbous tongue was thicker than a man at its base and stretched out to merely the width of a wrist where the giant bore it over his shoulder.
Not a soul moved even as the giant passed them, the beast behind him not even halfway out of the water even as he passed the docks and reached the village proper. The beast had the head of an eel with the whiskers of a catfish, save that each whisker formed a tentacle over forty feet long.
The only sound that joined the giant’s footsteps was the soft rustle of cloth as the villagers cleared his path. He’d reached the middle of the village by the time the beast’s dorsal fin fully cleared the water. Its spines where taller than a man and each bore a tip of ivory that dripped with midnight toxin.
Half of them were already broken, the fin itself tattered and torn, with spines shattered like the masts of a defeated flagship.
Only when the giant had fully cleared the village did the beast’s tail exit the water. The thing passed three hundred feet easily.
Only then did the giant pause, turning to face the village. What little murmuring had broken out went quiet, the whole community straining to hear the words of their savior.
The giant spoke not a word, but flipped the beast’s skull and dropped it onto the ground. The ragged wounds were half packed with mud from his long walk, but that did little to hide their brutal depth. What had once been a eye broader than most shields, spanning a good three feet across the creature’s skull, had been rendered into a crater.
The eye had been beaten permanently open, the eyelids ripped apart and lens shattered to expose the goop inside. Even that had not been enough, as the orbital socket was exposed for all to see, shattered into jagged chunks as it was.
If Groat’s scant experience with such monsters was to be trusted he reckoned the giant had taken it even further. Carving such a canyon into an opponents skull served only one purpose. The blood and muck must be concealing where he’d pried out its brain.
A triumphant yell rose over the village and broke the silence.
It wasn’t long before hundreds more joined it, screaming and shouting rising up to echo off the mountains above as months of pain and fear broke out into raw emotion.