The wind tagged, darted about, and tagged again the tired man sitting on the giant smoking skull of one of the pests he had been hired to help exterminate, not being happy with the result, the wind then pranced about him on his bloodied perch slapping at his clothes and tugging all moisture from his long fingers of his right hand. His left hand had been wrapped in a bloodied swath of flesh, torn from the heel of one of the formerly lumbering beasts that now lie about him.
No snow was falling on him at the moment, but the rocky landscape was crowded with drifts from previous falls. This was good; he had hated the snow ever since discovering it some few centuries ago. Travelers from Spain had once told him tales of such wonders as snow, and ice, but he had never believed until he had left his home for greener pastures long ago. Now he felt he had become all too familiar with the miserable, frozen phenomena. During the actual battle the intense cold had felt invigorating, but now he was just plain cold, and wet, and bone-gnawingly windy.
His boots were off. He had giggled as he took them off, and slid them into the luxuriantly steaming pool of blood that gathered by the base of the flensed skull upon which he now sat. The blood would cool soon enough. And then he would have to clean his feet off in the freezing slush of snowmelt nearby. But, for now, his feet were warm, and soaking away in the kind of tribute he had not been offered in as many centuries as it had been since he had first seen "snow."
Sighing deeply with muted contentment, he looked over the battleground at his fallen foes.
Several tribes of giants had come to participate in their own slaughter. The Ice Giants looked no better in death than they did in life; wetter, redder, but no more handsome. Large, misshapen heads rimmed with ice carved to look like enormous crowns, or ancient armor, some even sported ice carved into shapes of antlers, and twisting horns of ice sprouting from atop unsightly and improbable heads; shoulders wearing sewn together pelts of some huge mythic animals he had yet to see alive. Red blood stained their predominantly white hair where their corpses were strewn.
The Storm Giants were, to the last giant, naked. The berserkers of the giant tribes, they went into battle without any shred of clothing, nor carrying any weapons, counting upon their ferocity and numbers to overwhelm their foes. Tufts of their ruddy body hair waving in the breeze was all the life they showed now. They had a startling array of prettily colored eyes. Reds, oranges, yellows, and even violet eyes. He saw one such violet eye, trailing a bundle of nerves, sitting against a large rock not twenty meters from where he sat.
The giants of the Sea Tribes had been the most difficult to slay. They had ridden a fantastic assortment of creatures into battle, and while their name implied marine tendencies, in this landlocked battle, they had been both cavalry and artillery. Their bows and slings had been nightmarishly deadly. He had saluted them. They had danced destruction, and sung songs of mayhem better than any of their larger, more fierce looking cousins here with them.
Several of the great beasts they had ridden had retreated in the grand confusion of battle. He didn't care, he wasn't a herder, and had not been paid to slaughter livestock. People might call him a "butcher," but the idea of neatly sectioning off shanks, and loins... did not appeal.
Mister Wood and one of his grandsons had told him about the mammoths and the great snow serpents that the giants kept as sources of food, clothing, housing materials, and …eh…companionship no doubt, the filthy things…
A scattering of weapons made from yellowed, urine laced ice lay about the valley, their facets glinting in an occasional errant ray of sunlight; the giants making their weapons from their own piss had been a new trick. The infections that the surviving warriors from the city would catch after these battles would claim almost as many lives as the battles themselves. Some of the hideous weapons even had great lumps of feces worked into the edges. It made him shudder to think how close some of those very blades had come to him during this last fight. Some days it felt like he might be losing his edge.
His current employer had worked out the strategy in the great hall of the small walled city Mister Wood and his people had worked so hard to defend over the years. It was simple, lure as many frost giants into the stony valley as they could, and then let him and the mercenaries he had hired attack the great behemoths. For a grand, princely price he became the city of Aesyrhall’s secret weapon once every twenty years or so. Those who lived inside the city's walls produced more gold and gems in a decade than had some cultures he had witnessed rise and fall in his many years.
At the beginning of the battle most of the giants laughed as the “Little Human Man” drew his large wooden club. He would have had to admit, being called "human" hurt more than the broken fingers of his left hand, currently healing in its grizzly bandage. They would heal; but being relegated to "human." That was just mean.
Soon enough the great oafs began to notice his "little" club had obsidian blades embedded along its length, black teeth, ritually set in the wood of the rod's body, eaten and chewed their very souls.
Sadly enough for those giants who came looking for glory today in the valley below Aesyrhall, they never saw, even then, what Death slid and wove about them, as they raged, and bellowed, and howled, and sang... and dwindled, and gasped, and cried out in fear and pain. They never knew exactly what Death had come to crush, and cave in the dome of their great open frozen world. The endless sky of freedom and slaughter that had always been limitless above them was suddenly beset with limits; short, nasty slicing moments of pain that came to burn out the remainder of the eternity the giants had expected, and been promised by their Elders.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The tribes of giants had worried the people of the city by changing their tactics, tactics they had used since the world was young, and thought still to be made from the dead body of their greatest ancestors. Those same tactics though they had never worked too well, relying as they did on size alone, lately had faltered. But as the game changed in the last few years, and the people of the bright city began to notice the losses they suffered, new ideas had to be used. And once the "mayor" had come up with the notion to bring in an outsider to hit the giants with something they had never before seen, the call went out for a foreign warrior, and the price, he found, was exactly right. Let younger men fight for glory and righteousness, he had needs more earthly to be filled, and if felling these hoary oafs did it, so be it.
He wondered, if briefly, where they kept their women. Once, when he had been a younger God, he would have reveled in the traditional spoils of war, but this land was too blessedly cold and open to the sky for his liking; and even if he had a clue where the women were, he didn’t honestly think it was feasible for a man who only stood 1.75 meters tall to actually woo a giantess. And certainly not a village’s worth of them. However, given the personal grooming and hygiene habits of their men, he doubted he would be that interested in those huge women.
Once again, much of this life was now sport for younger Gods and newer heroes than he.
Wood had a plan for the rest of the giants if they chose not to leave the battlefield. It was a good one, and it was his favorite because it depended entirely on his ability to never let a living foe leave any battle still alive. It had raised his asking price greatly during negotiations. If the lumbering hulks found out what they were facing, then the surprise would be lost, and they might even come up with a way to fight the blood crazed mercenary, so no survivors. As yet, four of the nine planned battles had turned exactly as written out by Mister Wood, and his obsequious half-brother who jointly ran Aesyrhall; for the remaining seven it would be crucial to not let his guard down. Getting sloppy in even one battle would cost him dearly. He was a noted strategist, in the past having been known to plan out the lives of people that had yet to even be born.
The small city’s leaders had fought so many battles in their own youths it was agreed that only one of the old coot’s grandchildren was a better leader; but Boh had not been seen in years, so the old man was in charge of the strategies in this small war. This suited him for two reasons. First, Boh was a terror, a horror he had not believed until the moment they had shaken hands. Pride or not, he had almost screamed. Now, he had no intention of ever meeting the fabled general again if he could help it, even an obsolescent Death God had a sense of self preservation. And, second, he not only needed the work, but loved exactly this type of employment over almost any other.
Bathing himself in the blood of others, drinking in the tatters of their souls as they died screaming, these things were what his followers in yesteryears had done to propitiate him, so that he would bring them victory in their battles. These ritual days of death gave him life and power. He would never give this up, because he never intended to give up neither Life nor Power.
There had been bad times. Dark times. After the Spanish had come to his mountains and jungles. Most of his family were now dead. Some fell in battle. Some fell when they had lost their own followers. A few shriveled up, shrinking down in scope to become lesser beings of the Jungles and Rivers. Some of his God and Goddess siblings had even converted to the God brought by the Spaniards, rather than face the Darkness on the Other Side of Creation, a few living on in a bizarre half-life as "Saints."
Looking down at his bladed club, he began to pick some of the larger orts from the spaces between the obsidian flakes embedded along the length as he sat on the oversized bone dome of a fallen cretin; He nibbled at some of the softer tissues he was able to extract. The giants stank, but their flesh was plentiful today, and their blood was as good as any human's.
He glanced down at the skull on which he sat, and the blood pond in which his feet now soaked. He noticed the body was cooling rapidly in the razoring winds as he leaned back to rest his sore left elbow in the hollow of the quickly cooling ear. He knew that a good soak awaited him in the rooms the town elders had granted him to guest in while on their bloody business. He looked forward to the hot chocolate they had promised him. He could care less about the mead they constantly yammered of. But, these people had adopted his own people's love of all things chocolate in a way that no other European deity families had, and now he would attempt to drink every last drop they had available in Aesyrhall over the next seven nights.
Hair, fur and other barely recognizable gobbets of flesh had become caked amongst the shining black glasslike blades, and he thought about borrowing some of the axes, hammers, or swords these northerners preferred. But, no, that would be out of his character, and a distinct style and class are so hard to regain if you ever let them drop…look at the Greek hero…becoming a whoremonger should have been beneath him, but in retirement he decided to open his vaunted pleasure house…most likely to anger his stepmother. And now Herkulaeon was as fat as his wine soaked uncle, and trying to feed a Hero God's soul on the offerings of a Lust God's leavings. It was his own personal nightmare, so no…no swords or axes on this job.
Sitting up and adjusting the fur lined cloak about his shoulders, he had to admit the landscape was impressive, if it was lacking the jungles he missed. Sweeping planes of rock and ice, the winds that even now teased his gray and black hair about his head and seemed to dance with abandon in the joy of this fleeting moment. For a place of such extremes in death and harsh cold, it was also vibrant and very much alive. A Death God, even one as far from his own lands, and his worshippers long dead, could see the life around him here.
He had even seen small white foxes chasing hares through the snow, and raptors of various description lace, and twine gracefully through the air above him in the exultant dance of life and death. He bet that come spring, though there would be snow still in this place, there would also grow flowers. The death he had sown today, and would sow in the coming seven, would bring new and vibrant life to this bleak valley. The people of Aesyrhall could even build terraced grain fields up the side of the valley walls, and fertilize them quite well with what he had done here today.
He smiled at the thought when the catchy little salsa tune coming from his wooly coat signaled an incoming call.
“This is going to be one hell of a roaming charge…” Tzal said as he fumbled for his device in the inner pocket of the bloodied, and torn furs he had been given to wear at the beginning of this job by one of Wood's granddaughters.
"Ah," he said. "Hello. Oh, you're with Mister Amra? How is the Old Hawk? Oh, I see. That is very dire, yessssss." He rolled his eyes; some of these clients always thought the sky was falling. "Yes! I will be available for a commission in 8 days, certainly!”