A Giant's Heart: Chapter 6

The next few minutes is spent gathering wood.  A nearby deadfall provided more than enough easily accessed dry wood.  Clearing an area near the giant I build a fire and set it alight with some dry grass and my sparkstone.  Once I am sure it is a good healthy flame I go and check on the still form.  She was alive but cold to the touch.  The heat of the fire contained within this hollow ought to help with that.  I touch her parched lips.  She needed water.

Checking the fire one last time and making sure it had plenty of fuel I then set out for the bodies of her parents.  I had noticed some gourd bottles tied to the mother’s rope belt.  Once there I take everything of use from the two giants, which wasn’t much.  A few gourds filled with foul smelling liquor, which I promptly empty onto the ground, a couple of sacks of sun dried trout, two lengths of rope, the rusty blade of a human sized knife they’d either found or taken, and a bone needle with a ball of twine.  I also cut the patchwork clothes from their bodies so that I might fashion a blanket from them.  Everything gathered into the father’s bear fur cape I bundle it and return to the camp.  There I deposit the goods and cover the unconscious giant with her parents garments.  The area was warm now, the bright crackling fire doing its work.  I add another log to the flames then pick up the gourds and make for a nearby stream.

Away from the camp, away from the site of the beating and subsequent massacre, the forest is so still and peaceful.  Absolutely lovely in the pale light of the moon.  The only noise the sigh of the spring breeze through tall pines.  My important task keeps me focused on the present.  I had a real purpose, someone counting on me, a rare thing nowadays in my pampered retirement.  For a few precious minutes my troubled spirit is at ease and I feel as if I could actually breath for the first time in weeks.  Peace.

As always it is a fleeting thing, evaporating the instant I notice it, but I am momentarily rejuvenated.  I lived for those rare little moments.   I only found them out here.  I laugh humorlessly.  A life in the city?  Impossible!  Once at the pebbly bank I take a moment to splash my face and enjoy a drink of the cold clear water myself.  The gourds are washed and filled then I head back to camp once more with an extra spring in my step.  The only downside of those moments of peace were that they often caused me to relax and lower my defenses.  Walking through the moonlit forest with the sloshing of the string of stoppered gourds over my shoulder my mind wanders.

Looting the bodies of those dead hill giants brought back feelings of another time.  Back to those early days when we looted everything then carefully counted and divvied every copper piece only to spend them like fools at the next tavern or brothel down the road.  The times we had!  The trouble we got into!  Us against the world.  It was all so simple then.  Hard, dangerous, thankless work, but simple.  We were the heroes of our own tale.  Oh what a time we had.  What a team.  Arjan’s arcane might, Lymandri’s unwavering faith, Zayne’s guile and cleverness, and of course my unerring blade.  The friendship, the camaraderie, the bond that only people who had risked everything together could understand.  I didn’t realize it at the time, I thought they would last forever, but those truly were golden days.

My steps falter as the image, seared into my memory in all of its terrible detail, of Lymandri’s living soul being wrenched from her body and devoured by the horrific Simbraug fills my mind.  It happened so fast!  Where was Lymandri’s goddess then?  After all she’d done for the glory of the Light my dear friend died in a dark abyss.  In an instant her bright soul snuffed out forever and denied the afterlife she had so often told us about.  Why hadn’t the goddess saved Lym’s eternal soul?  What did she do wrong?  Why didn’t I stop it?  Why her and not me!?  Gods…that scream! I pause and lean against the nearest tree for support.  Laying a hand over my forehead I try to cast out sights and sounds, or at least bottle them back down again.  Perhaps a Psiomancer wasn’t such a bad idea.  Just a memory or two changed or erased might make a world of difference.  Taking a deep fortifying breath I remind myself that I did all that I could, even slaying the foul creature in the end.  They say I saved the world that day, showering me in honors and wealth for my deed, and perhaps they were right.  All I knew for sure was that I hadn’t been able to save my friend.

There were good guys and bad guys in the world.  Real good and evil.  Light and dark.  Heaven and hell.  I more than anyone knew that.  Why was it becoming so difficult to tell one from the other?  When had things become complicated?  Why had the world become so…gray?

I let out a joyless sigh and curse my luck.  Things had just been getting a little bit better recently and now these fucking giants had come to stir everything up again.  That damned amber eyed giantess and her desperate plight bringing out all of my weaknesses like never before and sending my mind spinning.  Yet these things were bound to happen though out here on the frontier.  It would surely happen again.  The King had granted me this land for precisely incursions like this.  I sigh again.  Perhaps a safe life in the city wasn’t the worst thing for me after all.

I slap my cheeks.  “Snap out of this man.  You are stronger than this.  It’s just a hill giant.  Just go home and let the monster perish.”

The only thing waiting for me at home would be a warm bed…and the nightmares that would surely follow after this emotional day.  I refocus on the immediate task at hand.  The dreams could wait, they would always be there in the end.

Chapter 7