Laeknir was the last giant, or so it seemed.

For a hundred years he’d walked the mountains alone. Each thunderous step came harder than the one before it. He’d searched for kin, for meat, for something to warm him through those endless, dark nights, but he found nothing. His hunger was insatiable, his loneliness impossible to cure. More than once he’d considered travelling south to distant lands in the vain hope he might find solace there, but the mountains were his ancestral home and it was blasphemy to move anywhere else.

Worst of all, he was a coward. The tennets of those who had come before him were clear about what he should do. He was supposed to forge weapons—sword and shield, spear and hammer. He was supposed to go walking to the short-ones who had killed his family and friends, to set fire to their towns and do battle with them. Giants held grudges, each grudge was supposed to be paid in blood.

But a hundred years had passed and a hundred years he had hidden. He walked only in the snowstorms, kept out of sight as much as he could. The truth was that Laeknir feared death.

The boys who came now and again to try to slay him did nothing to remedy this crushing truth. Even after he’d smashed them to pieces, or boiled them up to eat, he felt nothing but fear and regret. A further truth—one that whispered to him only on the darkest and loneliest of nights—was that Laeknir was scared of them.

The fear stemmed from a night a hundred years before, where the short-ones had rallied their most terrifying warriors and come for his wife and children. They’d wrapped them up in ropes, jabbed at them with spears, chopped their limbs with axes. Laeknir had tried to fight back, but soon enough the short-ones had claimed their prizes. They’d taken the bones of his family and raised them as trophies or used them for medicine. Lakenir only just survived, and ever since he’d been scared.

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A scared giant was like a bear without claws, or a sun that bore no light. For the last fifty years or so, Laeknir had a lot of time to mull things over. The one thing that he kept thinking was that he should go and climb the tallest mountain peak he could find, that he should teeter on the edge for a few moments—perhaps to say a prayer to the cosmos—then throw himself over the edge.

But the killing of one’s self went against the Sculptor’s plan, so Laeknir continued on. He snatched what little livestock he could, keeping his cave at the base of the mountain a secret. The boredom was sometimes too much to bear. Some mornings he awoke under the cover of his thick, scratchy blanket and found no strength to rise. He tried to tell himself stories, saga tales of giant warriors who had prevailed under the most grim of circumstances, but some days even those could not rouse him from his slumber.

Then came a night in the winter when he looked up at the wailing cosmos. Fierce winds blew in from the north. A frost giant could always tell when a snowstorm was coming and this one was to be particularly callous and unyielding. Laeknir’s eyes were full of stars and he took a deep breath in. It was said that each light up there was the spirit of a giant who had passed on. He begged them for help.

“What must I do?” he cried.

At first no reply came.

“What must I do?”

Then, a whisper:

You must wait. Something is coming.

So Laeknir waited as the storm blew in from the north and the mountains became shrouded in a powdery, white mist.