The Giants

Myths are just exaggerated legends. And many of your legends predate recorded history, some by tens of thousands of years. Many people believe these strings reach back a hundred thousand years. You can find stories throughout your legends of the ancient giants. Even later findings of gigantic bodies and bones uncovered, discoveries of large skeletons. Most of it easily disproved. However, every culture seems to have stories of these huge hominids. After all, human legends are rooted in forgotten history.

Long before your history, before prehistory early peoples shared the earth. There were many of us, large families and various tribes. We all looked different and used different tools, created different kinds of shelters. We were all discovering language at the same time, building small communities; the fires were kept alive at all hours of the day.

Some of us walked to nearby rivers and collected fish from reed baskets. Others collected olives and pomegranates. We split duties by strength and size. There was some fighting and battling between different groups and types. It would be a big stretch to call this ‘war’ in any sense compared to your recorded histories. But there was also a lot of collaboration. A lot of inadvertent exchanging of ideas and words. Cultures were being created, and they were evolving into the forever of generations to come.

One thing we all had in common was a horrid fear of the giants. The huge beasts looked like bearded monsters. They came in the middle of the night, raiding our small villages, sacking the food storage, murdering and raping our families. Their clubs and sharpened black rocks were hideous weapons compared to the smaller peoples’.

The giants stood twice as tall as our tallest fruit pickers. Their weapons and craft were terrifying. Although they didn’t need such weapons to trample and destroy the huts or crush the bones of we helpless targets, they still used them anyway. Cutting and beating and torturing, occasionally enslaving.

There were two types of giants, but it was almost impossible for us to tell them apart. Some tribes had names for them. Others just referred to them as the o'oglünt. We had no written words, but it sounded like that. Roughly meaning two times bigger, twice less hair. This was a common word among different villages and peoples, even with their different customs, gods and terms. Our children were rightfully scared after hearing the stories told at night by the elders. Stories of horrible things. Stories that were tame compared to what really happened. The stories about o'oglünt became ubiquitous like the word itself. Similar horrors retold throughout the various tribes and families. Through time, even the giants themselves began telling similar stories to their own young. Fear can be used to sculpt belief and program behavior. It’s an involuntary phenomenon, another ubiquity found throughout cultures. Just as story and myth lit up like faces around flames of a fire, watching above as the sparks blend with stars.

The terror of giants lasted for tens of thousands of years. The giants made this perversion part of their culture. They emerged into this way of being. They didn’t stop until every small kind was eradicated. Some of the small types adopted nomadic ways, constantly traveling to escape the coming wrath. They were eventually found and snuffed into extinction. Some died out on their own in the cold northern regions. Most were systematically murdered.

The two different types of giants started working together and eventually interbred. They were excellent hunters, warriors, killers. Their intelligence grew, or perhaps devolved depending on your take. After they killed off every lineage of the smaller ones, that’s when they started fighting each other.

They made cities, and gods, and new weapons—all used to fight each other. Their language evolved and they turned it into written word with complicated syntax. They created money and learned how to control their growing masses with this new god of gold. After that… they created history.

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