Stone Sentinels Part Two: The Giant Hunts

                The sun broke into the shadows of the cave mouth like a cat burglar, opportunistically snatching up whatever darkness it could lay its hands on. Its pockets must already have been stuffed full from lighting up the whole valley, but still it crept forwards into the cave, cramming the remnant shadows into its cheeks like a radiant hamster.
                The Sorceress of Thessalus, tall and regal, strode into the sunlight with her hood pulled over her head, ready to flex her magical might. She bristled with anticipation, eager to test her newly crafted magic on worthy foes and vessels. Runes of power glowed in red and gold on her skin, tracing lines across the backs of her hands and up her arms, underneath her blood-red robes. She breathed in deeply to taste the mountain air. The giant hunts were at hand.

                There were still four of them roaming the valley, having awoken from their stony slumber the day before. Bewildered and disoriented, they had been left alone whilst the sorceress and her new guests had dealt with a minor feudal revolt, and she could only imagine what new flavour of carnage they’d wreaked in the meantime. It had been a nostalgic afternoon for the sorceress, lecturing the ignorant and punishing those who stood against her, and she looked back upon it fondly, but they day ahead promised to be a different and more exciting experience.

                In the centuries of isolation to which she had consigned herself the sorceress had set about crafting new forms of magic, formulating new spells and runes, and making herself the greatest magic wielder this world had ever known. Now that she had some apprentices, not her own but apprentices none the less, she could test some of those spells out. She’d sought permission from their owner, Professor Taith, first of course; to do anything else would have been disrespectful. The professor had been reticent initially, citing such concerns as ‘mortal danger’ and ‘contemptible megalomania’, but the sorceress could be very convincing. She had her ways of making the professor’s thinking a perfect mirror of her own.
                Looking out into the valley whilst waiting for her subjects to be ready, the sorceress cast her eyes down to the river, where the giant she was forced to slay yesterday had been thrown. She couldn’t help but notice the distinct lack of a titanic fleshy body.
                ‘He survived?! Hardy beasts these giants.’ She thought to herself. ‘All the better for testing the new spells, I suppose. And now there are five to play with.’

                It was a few minutes before the first of the party arrived at her back. Two of the apprentices, Jake and Robert, ambled to the cave mouth in sleepy silence.
                “Good, you’re up. Are your colleagues and your master on the way?” she asked them. The sorceress had been labouring under the impression that the four younger members of the expedition were apprentices of Professor Taith, bound in servitude to her in exchange for knowledge and training. They were in fact students, and the professor was bound to them as a condition on being allowed a sabbatical. Despite this rather fundamental misunderstanding, Jake and Robert were unwilling to correct the sorceress, on account of the frankly petrifying magic she had been throwing around since they’d met her. So far she was on one confirmed kill and over a hundred enslavements, and they’d been with her for less than a day.
                “I think so, yeah.” Jake told the sorceress.
                “The professor was faffing around with some papers and stones or something.” Robert added. The sorceress nodded to acknowledge what they’d said. “My head’s feeling much better now, by the way. Thanks again for that.”
                The evening before, Robert had found himself on the newsworthy end of a clubbing when the local peasantry had attempted to stage a millennium-delayed uprising against the Sorceress of Thessalus. After the festivities had ended in an increase in the number of statues nearby, and an equal decrease in the number of rioting peasants, the sorceress had patched Robert’s wound up with some healing magic.
                “I can’t have my test pieces damaged before I start, can I?” the sorceress said by way of reply. It was less of a ‘you’re welcome’ and more of an ‘it was convenient to me’, but either way Robert’s cranial trauma was no more.

                The three of them stood outside the entrance of the cave in silence, the students too intimidated to talk to one another freely in the presence of the sorceress, and the sorceress not having anything in particular to say to the professor’s apprentices. Vanessa was the next to appear, her bag still wet from her attempts to wash off the finger-blood stains from the day before. Soon after, the professor and Gerald appeared together. The professor was wearing a satchel stuffed to the brim with parchments, rune-stones and notes.
                “Brought some light reading for hunting giants I see, professor.” Robert said, in a what-on-Earth-are-you-doing tone. His self-confidence always increased when it came to mocking authority figures who couldn’t shoot fire from their hands.
                “This magic is fascinating! Can you not comprehend how important it is that magic is real? The number of myths of the Butine Valley alone which are probably true is mind-boggling! The giants, the sorceress, the three-headed sheep, the fable of the hoofed blacksmith, the baker with no elbows – it’s all historical fact.” Her eyes were alight with excitement.
                “I’m not saying the history isn’t great, but you’d rather be reading it now? While we’re hunting giants?”
                “It’s not all history. There are notes here too; notes on how to cast spells and runes to make it possible. I’m not just going to learn about how magic was used, and I’m going to learn to use it myself.”
                “One of the conditions on my making use of you was that I agreed to take your professor on as my apprentice. You’re never too old to learn.” The sorceress supported.
                The students were sceptical about having a magically empowered professor. The homework questions alone would be a death sentence. Uncertain enough about being human test subjects for magic and hunting down giants, the students now had to contend with the prospect of an examiner who could freeze them in place to stop them going to the toilet.
                “Before we go, I’m going to cast a spell of understanding on you all. It will allow you to understand what the giants say, if they speak, and allow them to understand you.”
                “Why would we want to do that?” Vanessa asked suspiciously. “I don’t like hunting anyway. Hearing what I’m hunting screaming at me for mercy doesn’t sound like it’ll make the experience any better.”
                “Because we aren’t hunting rabbits, these are dangerous sentient creatures. There’s every chance that you might be able to trick or stall them if you can talk to them. You can go first, I think. Hold still” The sorceress pressed her hand to Vanessa’s throat and a soft white glow enveloped her head and neck. One by one she did the same to the others and, once they’d all agreed that they felt no different, they departed into the valley.

                The sorceress directed them along the valley with confidence. She hadn’t deigned to share with anyone else the means by which she knew where to look, so they assumed variously that it was magic, GPS, guesswork, and reading-between-the-lines of today’s horoscope. In the absence of any need to navigate, however, Jake asked a question that he felt was relatively important.
                “Lady Sorceress? Why are we hunting down the giants again?”
                “Because they tried to kill me and now they’re running free.”
                “And why did they try to kill you? I thought you said that you helped them out against the valley tribes?”
                She sighed. “Because they, like everyone else in this valley, were incapable of thinking for themselves or appreciating the whole picture.” It was a sweeping generalisation, but Jake had to admit that he’d seen no evidence to the contrary so far.
                “They must have had some reason though. Even morons like those farmers wouldn’t immediately try to lynch you for saving their lives.”
                “Wouldn’t they?”
                “Hmm.” Jake couldn’t confidently back up his assertion.
                “Exactly.” The sorceress responded. “My only crime was trying to mediate between the giants and the tribes, so really they tried to lynch me for saving both them and somebody else. Keeping the peace between the humans and the giants was very difficult, mostly because neither one was willing to tolerate the other being alive. There was very little ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to it either. The humans and giants had both lived in the valley for generations so it wasn’t like either side was an invader, but they just couldn’t get along. The humans were always afraid of the giants for obvious reasons, and the giants’ tendency to eat livestock and farmers only made it worse. The giants disliked the humans because they insisted on trying to defend themselves against being eaten, and all the while encroached farther and farther into the valley.”
                “They sound like pretty fundamental problems.” Jake conceded.
                “They were. When the tribes put border patrols in place to warn of incoming giants near the livestock I turned a blind eye. It was confrontational, but strictly defensive and I could understand it. There were occasional skirmishes breaking out too, a small group of humans would break away to attack a giant, or a giant would get angry and throw a farmhouse into the river, but it was the exception. When the tribes started organising true hunting parties, however, I felt that I should step in and ask them kindly to stop.”
                “Kindly, like, talking to them?”
                “Yes, talking to them. Via the flaming corpse of a headless wolf.”
                A chorus of ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘good Christ woman what were you thinking’ rang out in reply.
                “Well it didn’t work out tremendously, which is why I’ve been far more direct ever since; I learned my lesson. Regardless, the valley tribes protested to the flaming wolf that they hunted the giants because they were tired of farmers being slaughtered and sheep being eaten, and it had been happening more frequently. To be honest, it was a shockingly reasonable statement for these barbarians to make, and it gave me something to work towards fixing. Knowing that the humans weren’t after a total extinction, it was time for a parlay with the giants.”
                “Did you try talking to them as a flaming headless giraffe?”
                “Silence, boy. There were six giants living in the valley who were close enough to prey on this group of peasants. None of them were together, of course - as a rule giants don’t get along well with each other - so I needed to visit each of them in turn. The two closest were Tigoth and Urtoll. Tigoth was a simpleton, even by the catastrophically low standards set by giants, but he wasn’t a monster. I knew that either convincing or tricking him into leaving the humans alone would be easy, and he wasn’t likely to be murdering any farmers for fun. He’s the one I returned to stone yesterday, incidentally.
                Urtoll was another matter. He most definitely was, or is I suppose, a monster. Tigoth would eat a field of sheep to satisfy his hunger. Urtoll would eat the shepherd and then kill the sheep for sport. He’s conniving too, just clever enough to cause trouble. A savage like that would always be more of a problem to reason with than Tigoth, but not impossible; after all, the greatest mind among the giants would still be as a child’s against mine. So I felt safe in leaving Tigoth alone, while I travelled to Urtoll and set about bringing him round to my way of thinking.”
                “Why not just kill him if he was that much of a monster?” Vanessa interrupted.
                “Why not indeed. I wish I had, but I was naïve. I thought I was capable of maintaining a peace, but that didn’t turn out so well. When I met with Urtoll he was as much of a liability as I had expected. All others who meet me have the sense to revere or fear me, but Urtoll had a defiant streak. I suppose he was accustomed to being the strongest and most dangerous and wanted to stay that way, so I was a challenge to his status. He raged and shouted about the hunting parties that had started appearing and protested against me, but I eventually convinced him that my wrath was a fate worse than a hunger for sheep. He gave me his word that he would leave the farmers alone, but that he would defend himself without hesitation or mercy. That turned out to be a lie, of course.”
                “Of course.” Gerald agreed reflexively. He was used to agreeing quickly when any lecturer said ‘of course’, to make it sound like he was listening. The sorceress gave him a sideways glance and then continued.
                “I waited until the following day to speak to Tigoth, but the situation had escalated. I found dozens of men from the valley tribes, armed with pitch forks, flaming torches, hammers, and supposedly cursed vegetables, swarming over Tigoth. They’d used grappling hooks and rope to bring him down and they had him bound like a hog. Clearly, they wanted Tigoth’s head and were quite serious about acquiring it, but I couldn’t allow that to happen. If I had let them kill him then the other giants would have retaliated; bloodshed would lead only to more bloodshed. So I marched into the centre of them, stood in front of the giant, and told the mob that there would be no lynching in my valley. They screamed and wailed at me, threatened me with violence, pleaded with me, spoke of their lost brothers and their fear. It transpired that there had been a massacre overnight; hundreds of sheep were slaughtered, a handful of shepherds were missing and the farmland had been trampled and ruined. Enough blood had been spilled to leave wet footprints, and they led directly back towards Tigoth’s home.
                “I couldn’t believe that Tigoth would have done something so callous. Urtoll, on the other hand, was exactly the right kind of sneaky and evil to set him up and use him to incite violence. The right kind of cruel and cutthroat to condemn another to death in pursuit of a war.
                “The mob was screaming for blood, so I stood atop Tigoth and told them that he was under my protection. They were to leave or feel my wrath. I sent flames over their heads, called down icy rains and made lightning strike around them as a reminder of whom they were dealing with, but promised them that I would not allow the giants to harm them anymore.
                “Did the headless wolf not make another appearance? Sounds like he was a better negotiator than you.”
                “Watch your words. The mob’s resolve was broken and it dispersed, but once the seeds of a witch-hunt are sewn they are terribly difficult to uproot, believe me.” The hunting party happened to pass a statue of one of the farmers at that moment, and it reinforced her point.
                “I freed Tigoth from his bindings, and told him in no uncertain terms not to seek revenge against the humans. I swore that I would keep him safe from the little men, and then set off to punish Urtoll for what he had done.
                Urtoll was nowhere near his home. It was frustrating and predictable that he had fled, but I couldn’t spend all day searching for him; with the peasants so panicked and bloodthirsty I had to find the other giants before more mobs were organised. I feared that Tigoth was just the beginning.
                “The other four giants lived farther down the course of the river, which you may notice is the path we are now taking. Gornosh’s territory was closest, followed by Geeda, Muka and Brot.
                Gornosh was a killer, plain and simple, but he rarely moved beyond the bounds of the lands he claimed as his own. If he caught trespassers then they were usually eaten, which is exactly what he dared to try with me when I visited him. I soon put him in his place however; your bramble cage wasn’t the first I’d ever made, boy.” She said with a nod to Gerald.
                “It did seem professionally woven.” He said drily.
                “I made myself clear regarding the humans and moved on. An hour or so later I let the brambles dissipate, when I thought he might have learned his lesson.
                “Geeda was next, unpredictable and antisocial at the best of times, and even worse when I was telling him what to do. We spoke, strained though it was, and I warned him of the dangers that might come his way unless he left the little men alone. Both from them and from me.
                “Muka was third, but I never managed to get through to him. He was like a feral beast, fearful and aggressive at the same time. The best I could do was shout at him, since he wouldn’t hold even a basic conversation without throwing rocks and obscenities.
                “Last of all was Brot. Brot was second in intelligence to Urtoll, but didn’t have the same love of cruelty, so I had high hopes for him, odd as it sounds. It clearly angered him to be told to stop eating livestock, but he didn’t challenge me like Urtoll. He held his tongue out of fear and accepted my terms far more graciously than Urtoll, which is to say he only threatened life under his breath.

                The sorceress stopped talking as the hunting party crested the peak of a small rise, which ran between higher mountains on either side. When the path opened out on the other side it unveiled to them a wide, shallow basin flanked by steep cliffs on either side. A deep blue lake stretched out on one side, filled by little clusters of waterfalls cascading down the cliff-face like a hand clasped over the ridge. It was as if the creator of a mountainous hand had lost count of the fingers half way, panicked, and then kept adding more to be sure there were enough.

                The hissing, crashing sound of the water echoed through the basin and seemed to come from all around. It covered the sounds of their feet crunching against the gravel of the path, as they made their way downwards to the flat plain at the bottom.
                “There he is.” The sorceress said ominously. Stamping around in puddles on the floodplain was a muddy giant with lank brown hair hanging over his ears, and torn three-quarter length trousers flapping around his calves. Gornosh was his name, but Gornosh was not his game, since it's exclusively a proper noun and has no other meaning in any context. His true game was stomping around the valley and scaring the human-folk and eating their sheep. He liked eating sheep, but the humans tended to put an awful lot of effort into stopping anything at all eat their sheep, simply because they eventually wished to eat their sheep themselves. This made Gornosh's game somewhat dangerous, particularly at those times when the pitchforks, torches and bows came into play. The worst was when the humans didn't even wait for him to go to them, and just turned up at his home. They often hurt him with their grappling hooks and weapons, but he always killed and ate them in revenge, so there was a silver lining.

                The other game he played, the one he’d spent the most time playing in his life, even if he didn’t like it as much, was to be a confused looking statue in the Butine Valley, acting as a home for moss, lichen, algae, and even a few colonies of mice for a while. He couldn't remember the exact circumstances under which that game had started, but he knew the sorceress had been involved.  He hated the sorceress.

                The mixed bag of emotions forming the deep, complex character of Gornosh had recently taken to angrily stamping in the puddles he’d found on the way to sorceress’ cave. He was unable to remember precisely why he was so furious, but tried to vent his frustrations anyway.
                “Which one is that?” asked Vanessa, watching the huge monstrosity splashing around.
                “Gornosh. He’s made it a long way into the valley since I returned him to flesh.” The sorceress said suspiciously. “It’s almost as if he was heading directly towards my cave for another ill-conceived attempt on my life.” The anger in her voice was obvious and rising. “Perfect. We don’t have so far to walk.” She span on her heels to face her entourage. “You. Jake. You’re going to help me here.” She snapped her fingers and beckoned him forwards as if he were an errant puppy. He didn’t feel much like a young dog, and he wasn’t sure that one would be useful when attempting to subdue a giant, but he obeyed regardless; nothing about the sorceress’ manner spoke of a tolerance for being defied.
                “This way all of you.” She marched off again with Jake at her side, striding purposefully towards the lumbering oaf, who was obliviously giving the wetter parts of the ground a damn good thrashing.
                Once they were within a few dozen metres the sorceress called her hunting party to a halt. Gornosh still hadn’t noticed that he was being watched; the sounds of the waterfalls covered their footsteps and his remarkably small capacity for perception prohibited anything but shallow pools of water from entering his mind.
                “Stand in front of me, Jake.” The sorceress instructed, lifting her arms and allowing her sleeves to slide back. The scripting on her forearms glowed and pulsed as she tensed and flexed her fingers. “I’m going to let you try this one solo, but I will be keeping watch. There’s very little chance that you’ll die.”
                “Wait, what?” Jake protested with an onset of immediate reluctance to get involved, but it was too late to dissuade the sorceress. Realistically, even if he had protested yesterday it would have been too late. An emerald green luminescence emanated from the sorceress’ palms and enveloped Jake, clinging to his body and spreading like fabric softener spilled onto a freshly baked loaf of bread. Jake’s heavy, fearful breathing was audible above the sounds of the waterfalls, and he gave a series of half-turns on the spot as he looked down at the light seeping over his body. He was also somewhat perturbed by how the ground was trying to get away from him. He was rather accustomed to it being a little less than six feet away for the most part, but now it seemed to have had second thoughts about their ongoing relationship; a little distance is all it wanted, but Jake really would have preferred a lengthy, awkward discussion about it first. His feet, too, wanted their own space, and it was apparent that they really did need it when they expanded in size several times. The gasps of the other students and the professor drifted into his ears as he felt himself rising inexorably towards the sky, still aware of the rocky ground beneath his rapidly extending feet.
                It only took a few moments. He was left standing in exactly the same spot, or in a new spot which happened to include all of the space that the old spot covered, but feeling many, many times taller. Jake the giant took his first glances at the world around him.
                The rest of the university party stood, mouths agape, staring at their enormous friend. Mercifully, the sorceress had chosen to enlarge Jake's clothing as well as his body, so they were all saved from an unwelcome and overly personal view of their friend.

                "Remember: try not to be killed! That's incredibly important." The little sorceress projected up to him, to assure the professor that she cared about Jake’s safety.
                Jake looked at his hands, his mind struggling to reconcile their gargantuan scale against the world around him, then down at sorceress. He was sure she’d been bigger than that just now, but then he began to doubt himself. He wasn’t sure of much anymore; the changes had been tremendous and mind-bending. He was a giant now, and so he found himself thinking of giant things; mountains seemed far more comprehensible than they used to be, whereas grass seemed awfully peculiar and insignificant. The sky was closer and more familiar, clouds had a more recognisable scale, and he had an overwhelming urge to start a new life in the clouds, with only a golden goose for company.
                “Do any of you have any magic beans? I’m looking to get a nice ladder for my new home.” He asked the tiny people around him.
                “What? There are no magic beans. Stay focused!” the sorceress shouted back.
                “Hm? Oh. Yeah. What am I doing?”
                “You’re going to pacify Gornosh over there!”
                “Right. On it.” He said, distracted from uncertainty by his newfound fear of children who sell cows for legumes.
                Jake strode unevenly down the valley towards Gornosh, who was still stamping around unpredictably. The closer Jake got the slower he walked, eventually taking tip-toed, creeping steps to avoid alerting his prey. Unfortunately, Gornosh’s random trajectory made it inevitable that he would turn around at some point. The giant turned a circle, looked directly at Jake, and then turned away again, leaving Jake in stunned, static confusion, until Gornosh performed a comic-book-perfect double-take and stared wide-eyed at him.
                Gornosh had been sure that there were none of his kind in the basin a few moments before. He was also sure that he would have recognised them when he saw them, and this face seemed new. Perhaps he had been crouched behind one of the little bushes until today? No, he can’t have been; they would barely have covered his foot. Did he even have feet? A glance confirmed that he did, but they were covered by the most peculiar moccasins that Gornosh had ever seen. None of the giants he knew had either a face or a pair of moccasins like this one did. That meant he was an intruder, unwelcome in this territory, and ripe for combat and expulsion in the old ways – a head-first charge.

                “Why did you stop there?” Asked Robert quizzically, looking at Jake lumbering towards Gornosh.

                “What do you mean?” the sorceress asked.

                “I mean why stop when he's the exact same size as the giant. If you want him to have an advantage you could just make him even larger, until he's a whole new level of giant compared to that one. Then Jake could just crush him.”

                The Sorceress of Thessalus opened her mouth to reply but then stopped. She wasn't sure why, truth be told. It just hadn't occurred to her.

                “You were so fixed on solving the problem one way that you completely missed an obvious solution. I used to do that when I studied maths, was never any good at it.” Gerald informed them.

                “Well he should get used to being a giant first. Then we can consider weaving a new spell to make him a...”

                “Super giant?”

                “Mega giant?”

                “Giant - deluxe edition?”

                “Long giant iced tea?”

                “Barry Manilow?”
                “Super giant will be sufficient.” The professor snapped, trying to sound serious and authoritative. Unfortunately, those words could never be said in such a way.

                Having made up his mind that combat was the only way forwards, Gornosh tucked his neck in, scraped his feet on the ground, and bellowed a guttural challenge to his opponent. Jake looked on in bewilderment and fear at the psychotic, bullish display. Slightly offended by his opponent’s lack of decorum in preparing for battle, Gornosh accelerated into an awkward, bow-legged run and charged at Jake, who easily stepped aside in time to let the enormous simpleton sail past. The giant seemed confused by this; normally, the opponent charged right back and the first person not to break their neck tended to win the fight. Not always, though; the humiliating defeat of Goroth the Unclad by Broken-Neck Igga was a classic tale of triumph over adversity.
                Unsure of how to handle this new situation, Gornosh elected to continue charging. Every other time, the charge had been brought to a halt by a major collision with the opponent. Manually stopping was as foreign as it was anti-climactic, and so kept sprinting along the river bed, running farther and farther away as the students looked on in horrified confusion.
                "Well don't just stand there! After him! We're hunting him for goodness sake!" The sorceress ordered him urgently.
                "What do I do when I catch up to him?"
                "Take him down, restrain him. Use your giant's strength to bludgeon him into a paste before he does the same to you."
                "Gotcha. I think"
                Jake accelerated to breakneck speeds in no time and gave chase to the charging giant. It was a most peculiar feeling for him - being so much taller and heavier didn't scale as he would have expected; his legs didn't propel him upward as high as he thought they would, and every time he landed the impact with the ground was noticeably heavier than it should have been. Immediately he understood the strange, shuffling gait that Gornosh had adopted in his charge; it wasn't so much a matter of physiology or lack of practice, as it was of safeguarding one's ankles from shattering during a jog to the shops. Giants probably didn't have shops of their own, but they might have popped to the local human off-licence to scrounge a tonne or so of Pringles, Jake supposed.

                Two pairs of huge feet slammed against the slopes and pushed themselves away in a shower of loose rocks. The ground shook beneath both of them as they sprinting in a rapidly closing pair through the otherwise deserted valley, neither one saying a word through the exertion of running for upwards of thirteen long seconds.

                Jake had almost caught up with the still-charging Gornosh. He could hear the ragged, laboured breathing of an unfit, out-of-practice giant who had spent the last millennium as a statue, a lifestyle which doesn't promote high stamina. If anything, it increases the already high risks of muscle wastage due to water erosion and moss damage.

                Jake was also breathing heavily; inexpertly cajoling his new body into sprinting, much against its own will, was exhausting. Given the choice his new body would have instead been laying down in the river, totally avoiding the problem of trying to balance itself or maintain any kind of forward momentum. He felt like a baby trying to learn to walk, except unlike the majority of toddlers he was several metres tall and attempting to dump tackle a misguided aggressor at the behest of a deranged sorceress. No parenting book would prepare anyone for this.

               

                Gornosh was deeply confused. Not only was he in the unprecedented position of having not been stopped, but the rival charger seemed to be heading in the same direction as him. Everything he knew about charging, which was an awful lot by his own estimation and very little indeed in objective terms, told him that the only way to win was by going as fast as possible and not breaking your neck. He couldn't immediately, or even after a significant delay, picture how this particular strategy would work out in the current anomalous circumstances, but he was not going to go against his instincts. With newfound determination, he brought forth a fresh burst of speed which carried him forward ever faster for a full half a second before melting away in a sea of burning thighs and screaming lungs. It seemed that his mal-nourished and already exhausted legs just had no more to give.

                Jake ran as cautiously as he could without losing ground on the giant, attempting to weave his way around the statues newly strewn around the valley. The sorceress must have sent them all scattering outwards with some powerful magic, because even this far away there was a dense collection of horrified stances. More than once, Jake failed to place his foot down carefully enough, and felt the granite entombment of a dark ages peasant crushed to rubble beneath him. It gave him the same guilty feeling as someone who accidentally treads on a snail whilst it makes a bold dash across the pavement at night. However, since he'd never seen snails organise themselves into a determined murder-mob and attack a woman in her home, he probably sympathised more with the gastropods than the farmers in this situation.

                All invertebrate sympathies left aside, Jake was within arm's reach of Gornosh, who knew that this new invader was closing fast. He tucked his head tighter in to his chest, as a proper combatant should when the final impact approaches, and prepared for whatever was coming his way. Jake leapt forward and rugby-tackled Gornosh, who fell crashing to the ground and landed uncomfortably on a collection of boulders and a petrified peasant. Luckily enough for Jake, Gornosh’s stodgy body gave him a relatively soft landing, and after a few seconds of orienting himself, Jake clambered on top of Gornosh in an attempt to pin him down.

                Gornosh had no understanding of how to deal with this new brand of conflict. Usually you just had to rub your head, take another run up, and try to make a snapping sound come from the other guy. This new giant didn’t seem to understand the rules of honourable combat at all, but Gornosh wasn’t going to be dragged down to his level.

                Gornosh pushed his palms against the ground and tried to stand up, but Jake was wholly against that happening. It was vitally important to him that he did not have to go for another run, as the task of getting air into his new giant body had become almost impossible already. He tried to reach his arms around Gornosh's and pin them to his side, but the old giant was ludicrously strong and simply carried on unimpeded. With a herculean effort but no break in composure, Gornosh stood himself up with a Jake backpack, and shook like a dog to try to shed his new burden.
                The sorceress and her hunting party ran to catch up with the wrestling giants. They’d covered an impressive distance during the charge, far more than the tiny human legs had been able to. When they got close, Gornosh’s frantic thrashing and shaking had finally managed to dislodge Jake, who landed precariously on one foot.
                “Be careful!” Robert shouted to his gargantuan friend. The advice had to be taken in relative terms, of course, because nothing about being magically transformed and then getting into a wrestling match with a giant could be considered remotely careful.
                “I’ll try!” Gornosh replied, a little confused but glad to have the support of the little man.
                “That’s not what… oh, whatever. Get him Jake!”
                “Will do!” Jake replied confidently, taking another lunge towards Gornosh. The old giant caught Jake’s shoulders and threw him aside easily.
                “You’re meant to charge! You’re doing it wrong!” he barked angrily.
                Jake regained his balance and lunged again, but Gornosh’s patience had run thin. He grabbed Jake by the throat and lifted him off the ground. The students screamed in terror and Professor Taith was looking uncomfortably at the sorceress, who was watched impassively.
                “That’s not charging! You stand back and then run! Then there’s a crack and I win!” the old giant explained inadequately.
                “Urkkk!” Jake replied, unable to force air through his throat. He grabbed and clawed uselessly at Gornosh’s hands and arms in an attempt to break his rigid grip, but the old giant was far too powerful.
                “Aren’t you going to do something?!” Robert pleaded of the sorceress.
                “That would rather interrupt the test, wouldn’t it?” she answered, sound bored and disappointed.
                “KICK HIM IN THE BOLLOCKS!" Gerald advised loudly.

                "Yeah! Give him one in the balls, Jake!" Robert agreed.

                "Listen to them, Jake." Came the professor's support.

                Dangling and wriggling in Gornosh’s grip, Jake pulled one leg back then swung it forwards with all the energy he could muster, directly into the crotch of Gornosh’s low-quality trousers. Immediately, Jake found himself falling to the ground and coughing for air, as Gornosh fell over sideways in the foetal position.

                “You see? The spell was successful. There was no need for your whining.” The sorceress told the others triumphantly.
                “I don’t think it was the spell that did this. The credit has to go to the knacker-kicking.” Gerald observed.
                “Delivered by the magically enhanced boot of my new giant.” The sorceress rebutted, over the groaning of Gornosh.
                “Robert!” came Jake’s deafening shoot, booming across the floodplain. He was unsteady on his feet, clearly suffering from the lack of oxygen to his head. “Must stay with Robert.” He added with groggy determination. Before anyone else had a chance to react, he reached downwards with one titanic hand and swept Robert into his palm. With his prize firmly claimed, Jake took off in his awkward run towards the head of the valley.
                “Jake! No!” Professor Taith shouted after him.
                “What’s he doing?” Vanessa asked incredulously.
                “I don’t know.” The sorceress said with mild curiosity. “It’s not part of the plan though.”
                Jake was ambling away, his whole body rolling from side to side as he ran with Robert clutched close to his chest.
                “Jake protect Robert!” He said possessively. The lack of air had taken a toll on Jake’s already stressed mind, allowing the primal giant-mind to take control away from his more human thought processes. Naturally he gave in to his most basic giant instincts, namely to kidnap someone of great value. Had Robert understood this, he would have been flattered. Instead he was disgusted by being inside Jake’s sweaty hands, and somewhat scared of the vast fall awaiting him if Jake lost his grip.
                “Get back here!” The sorceress shouted after him, but it fell on deaf ears, or at least ears which had decided to be deaf to her. She was rapidly concluding that giants were far more effort than they were worth. With a grunt of resignation, she flicked her hands toward Gornosh and then focused her attention on Jake, as the old giant was slowly overcome by bramble shackles. With the writing on her hands glowing angrily, she balled her fists at her sides and stamped hard on the ground with one foot.
                The floodplain itself seemed to vibrate with a furious energy, beads of water beginning to float above its surface before shooting off towards Jake’s legs. With each passing second the water around Jake became thicker and deeper, moving with him like an inverse life-ring, forcing him to wade and splash his way along the plain much more slowly.
                With Jake slowed down, the sorceress was able to casually stroll alongside him and place her hand inside the glistening mass of water. Slowly, Jake began to shrink and descend, and the water fell away from him in a flood which seemed to preferentially avoid the sorceress. Once it had flowed away completely, all that was left was a pair of soggy students, one of them looking very embarrassed with himself.
                “Um, sorry about that Robert.” Jake said bashfully.
                “No worries man. You protected the crap out of me. And you kicked a giant in the balls; that was pretty sweet.”
                “How do you feel, Jake? Any lingering desires for kidnap or running like you’ve soiled yourself?” The sorceress asked without an ounce of sympathy.
                “Uh, I think I’m alright. Throat hurts a bit.” There were large purple finger-mark bruises forming on his neck.
                “That’ll be the choking. Come along, there’s more work to do.”

                Robert, Jake and the Sorceress re-joined the others, finding two smiling faces and one grumpy frown.
                “The two of them could have been killed!” The professor shouted at the sorceress.
                “They’re unharmed. I’ve kept them safe.”
                “Jake was nearly choked to death and Robert could be been dropped or crushed!”
                The sorceress fixed the professor with an expression that fell somewhere between anger, understanding and constipation.
                “They are safe with me, and you will understand that as you learn from me. You will be ever more assured of their safety as long as you keep learning the ways of magic under my tutelage, remember?”
                The professor’s expression became strangely blank for a fraction of a second, as if she’d forgotten where she was and then remembered again.
                “No, no I won’t let you endanger them. They were to help you with this, not become your cannon-fodder!”
                “What on earth is a cannon? It doesn’t matter. I told you they will be safe!” The sorceress said, beads of sweat appearing on her forehead from concentration. The professor’s eyes went glassy for another second. Less glassy than her glasses, for reference, but more glassy than soup.
                “Yes, yes I suppose you’re right.” The professor said quietly, all traces of anger gone from her voice.
                “Was it always that easy to calm her down?” Robert muttered to Jake, slightly aggrieved that he’d always had to wait out her fury naturally.
                “Was what? Sorry, I wasn’t paying much attention. This little human body feels so… small.”
                “What are we going to do with him?” Vanessa asked, changing the subject and pointing towards Gornosh in his bramble wrappings. The barbs dug into his flesh, tiny cuts bleeding all over his body where they had ensnared him.
                The sorceress looked at Gornosh with a coldness that surpassed the glint of mischief and spite she’d exercised on the peasants. Under her gaze, the brambles started to constrict around his throat, cutting farther into his neck, wrists, stomach and thighs.
                “You’re choking him!” The professor exclaimed in horror.
                “Am I?” The sorceress replied with lazily feigned ignorance.
                “I thought we were moving beyond this needless spite against simple creatures.”
                “This isn’t a simple creature, and if I wanted to be spiteful you’d know about it. This is a mercy compared to what he deserves.” She replied icily. But then, with a sigh and a sneer, she snapped her fingers, and stone began to seep across his body. He didn’t seem to appreciate the change in circumstances, but his approval rating wasn’t something that the sorceress was overly concerned about.
                “Come on.” Said the sorceress, not even waiting to see the petrification finish. “We’ve got four more to go.”

                Beyond the floodplain the valley sloped downwards and began to widen, a large, wide, flat bank on either side of the river. Robert and Jake were nursing each other as they walked, Jake recovering from oxygen deprivation and transfiguration, and Robert recovering from the inside of Jake’s hands. The sorceress led the way, following the course of the river and tracking some trail that no-one else could see. Professor Taith spent far more time reading notes and examining runes than she did looking where she was going, so Gerald and Vanessa took it upon themselves to stay with her, guiding her out of the way of steep drops, and occasionally directing her into ankle-high rocks. Watching her fall over would never get old.
                “So, you spoke to all the giants and then what happened?” Jake called out to the sorceress, once he and Robert had come to terms with their brief elopement.
                “By the time I’d contacted them all it was late, so I set up a camp and tried to get some rest. I came to truly appreciate the futility of diplomacy with savages when I found myself awoken by a mysterious rustling sound coming from the bushes nearby. I don’t know if you’ve ever been near a giant when it’s trying to be stealthy, but I can assure you that they aren’t adept at it. At all. If a giant is able to get the drop on you then you deserve whatever it throws your way. And when there are five of them they might as well be having a conversation in your ear.

                “I remained silent and prepared myself for whatever a group of hiding giants might try – I was intrigued. Giants just don’t work together, as I said. Something special must have happened for these five to be this close without trying to head-butt one another, let alone working together towards a common goal or co-ordinating themselves. Something dangerous was afoot.
                “I heard the sound of scraping stone and fled from my canvas, moments before a boulder came down on top of it. In the moonlight I could see all five of them standing up the slope, wondering if they’d managed to kill me. When I set the hillside behind them ablaze they realised they hadn’t. Muka came at me first, charging headlong down the hill like an idiot. He was turned to stone before he’d closed even half the gap and slid rather gracelessly past me on his face.
                “I demanded an explanation from the other four but giants rarely explain things, even on those rare occasions when they have a reason behind their actions. The others found that I’d given them something to think about when they saw Muka skidding into the darkness, but they had their backs to a blazing inferno. It was a straight choice between me and the fire, and Urtoll chose to face the flames whilst Brot launched another rock at me. Geeda was following Muka’s lead and trying to get close, holding a tree trunk. Gornosh was close behind him.
                The fools should have followed Urtoll through the fire. They’d missed their opportunity the moment I knew they were creeping up on me. I sprouted thorns around Gornosh since he liked them so much the first time, turned Geeda into a sentinel on the spot, and used my magic to pull Brot down the slope towards me.
                “Powerless and prostrate in front of me, as all men should be, the giants became more talkative. They told me of Urtoll calling in on each of them after I’d left, convincing them that the little men of the valley wouldn’t rest until all giants were dead. Much like his lies to Tigoth he’d told them that I was working towards their destruction, and not trying to save them from their own rabid hunger. I’ve heard the testimonies of many doomed men before, and I know an excuse when I hear it. Urtoll may well have said these things to them, may well have led the greatest alliance the giants have ever known, but they were all savages and they’d all have delighted in my death.
                “I didn’t feel much like resting after all the excitement, besides which Urtoll was on the loose and there was still a wildfire raging next to my campsite. I turned Brot and Gornosh to sentinels and left all the statues where they’d fallen, then started my return journey home. Every now and again I saw a footprint of Urtoll’s leading back up-river, but I lost the trail before too long. I had a feeling I wouldn’t have to try very hard to find him.
                “When I reached my cave again it was still dark, but I could tell something was amiss. You get to know the shapes of the shadows when you live somewhere for long enough, and my landscape seemed to have gained a new boulder. This new rock didn’t take kindly to a jet of boiling water, and revealed itself to be Urtoll himself, waiting for me. I allowed him to get close, to give him the taste of hope which makes failure all the more painful, until he was crouching over me and about to strike. I could see the murder and the spite in his eyes, the delight in killing, the love of cruelty. But I could also see that his joints had stiffened into stone and he wasn’t going to be following through with his attack any time soon. It took him rather by surprise, being so close but unable to act. For him to be powerless so suddenly was delicious, the panic and the anger was palpable. I made sure he knew that he was beaten before I let the rest of him petrify, so that the feeling of defeat and fear could be the last thing he knew. Then I left him there for a thousand years, squatting outside my home in his moment of failure. It was a fitting punishment for him to defend me from others like himself, and an apt reminder of the rewards that await me when I try to help people.”
                “That’s a bit of a maudlin reaction isn’t it?”
                “Tch.” The sorceress replied, remaining silent therafter.

                The party was marching along the banks of the river when they spotted the next giant, Muka. He was sitting calmly by the water, seemingly unfazed by the turmoil of the last thousand years. He dipped his feet into the river, much wider at this point than further up the valley, and watched the fish swarm around him, giggling.

                "You can't seriously be telling us to attack him?" Jake asked incredulously.

                "Muka's a beast. All monsters have to rest sometime. As far as he knows, it was yesterday that he tried to kill me in my sleep."

                "But he was tricked."

                "He wasn't tricked into putting the wrong coat on, he was tricked into trying to murder me along with 4 accomplices. Protesting innocence because it wasn’t his idea only goes so far."

                "I won't attack an unarmed and non-threatening giant."

                "Do you all feel this way?"

                They nodded.

                "Fine then." The sorceress raised a hand to her throat "MUKA!"

                Muka looked up in shock and saw the sorceress on the hillside. It was possible to see the memories creeping back into his head, the effort of thinking clearly taking a tremendous toll on the giant's brain

                "What you want?" He shouted, standing up and backing away.

                "I want to talk to you about the little men of the valley. They are much more dangerous than they used to-" she started, but a rock soared through the air at her from Muka's hand and interrupted her train of thought. The students scattered desperately as the rock landed harmlessly among them.

                "Have I proved my point yet?" The sorceress asked sarcastically. “You would all do well to trust me when I give you instructions. The peasants were murderers, these giants are animals and I am right!” A selection of embarrassed faces gave implicit assent to her will.
                “Girl. Here.” The sorceress said simply, not even looking at the students. She had her eyes fixed on Muka who had started to run in the opposite direction, away from the hunting party.
                “You’re not going to turn me into a giant, are you?” Asked Vanessa, fearfully. She’d never live it down if she tried to run off clutching one of the boys.
                “I’ve already seen that in action.” The sorceress said dismissively. “I’ve got something different planned for you.” 

                She held Vanessa still and pressed the palm of a hand into her forehead. Vanessa was horrified to discover that the hand belonged to neither her nor the sorceress, and was looking thoroughly pickled. She articulated her feelings regarding the severed hand quickly and clearly to the sorceress.

                "Oh stop screaming, you basically had a whole bag of these yesterday." The sorceress chastised, attempting to move the severed hand in time with the wriggling girl. She began to press the hand harder, and a red glow seeped from underneath the palm, fixing it to Vanessa's skin. The sorceress then produced a strand of iridescent red light from her finger, like an attention-seeking worm. She joined one end to the hand on Vanessa’s forehead and flicked the other end towards Muka, catching him on the back of the head. The instant it made contact, Vanessa began to sprint in the peculiar bow-legged gait of the giant, eyes wide with confusion and horror. Her motions mirrored Muka’s perfectly, a marionette show across a grand scale.
                “Help me!” Vanessa shrieked, whilst moving away from the only people who would comply with her request. Muka’s voice rang out with the same request, a gruff echo.

                "Take control, girl!" The sorceress barked impatiently and unhelpfully. Vanessa was still fleeing as a perfect mirror of Muka. "His mind cannot be stronger than yours. Take control!"

                Vanessa was far from sure of how to assert her thoughts over someone else’s. In fact, at that moment she was struggling to remember how to move her own limbs at all. She'd never had to worry about it explicitly before; they’d always just gone where she wanted them to. Now, however, they’d taken it upon themselves to be driven by a terrified giant, so this was a reasonably good time to learn manual mode.
                With an effort of concentrated will and dissociated limbs, Vanessa focused her entire mind on stopping one of her legs from running. It considered her request in much the same way as a toddler considers any request to ‘please stop doing that’, namely by beginning to run even faster. Vanessa’s mental landscape then changed from ‘significant fear’ to ‘animal panic’, which proved to be a fortuitous happenstance. With such basic, primal fear for her life, scared that she might be left running against her own will forever, she managed to stop one of her legs.
                Running isn't something which takes well to being interrupted, especially by only one half of its ambulatory network. It doesn’t take a gentle, gradual path to stillness when so rudely and suddenly aborted. When Vanessa's right leg stopped dead in its tracks, the left kept going, pivoting her over and crunching her into the ground. Thankfully, she and Muka both agreed upon the importance of throwing one's arms out in recovery, and thus there were no disagreements involving the loftier limbs.
                Several arguments promptly ensued regarding which way to get up. Vanessa favoured rolling onto her back and sitting up, whereas Muka was striving to push up onto his hands and knees. This dichotomy manifested into the two of them rolling around on the valley floor in perfect unison, like a synchronised muck rolling team from the pig Olympics. The others from the hunting party would have been worried about Vanessa, if they weren't so busy laughing at her.

                “Will one of- urggh hnng cursed me!” Vanessa and Muka both screeched as they rolled, seemingly unable to agree on the sentiment they each wished to convey. They were on their right-sides, left leg kicking hard into the air whilst the right leg scraped itself through the dirt. It would be impossible to articulate the motions that their arms were undergoing without a series of diagrams and a triple-jointed demonstration-piece.
                “Someone please- uggh shut up! Not my words! Shhuuuu- he’s trying to talk with my mouth!” the not-so-happy couple complained without an ounce of clarity.
                “You’re stronger than him! He’s an imbecile! Move with purpose!” The sorceress shouted, looking on with impatient fascination.
                Vanessa grimaced, although it was unclear whether she or Muka had intended to do so, and violently twisted onto her back. Across the valley, Muka did the same, landing uncomfortably on a large rock.
                “Ow!” they both shouted.
                “Did that hurt, Vanessa?” The sorceress asked urgently, but more out of curiosity than concern.
                “No, not at- uuuuuggh- not at all.”
                “Interesting. Good.”
                Jerkily, Vanessa sat up, as did Muka. Each of their limbs were making short but jagged motions as the two of them battled for control. With a grunt of triumph, Vanessa bent her knees and planted her feet flat on the floor. Muka seemed to have far more trouble adopting this pose, judging by the look of discomfort that flashed onto both of their faces. After rocking backwards and forwards for momentum, the pair of them leaned forwards and pushed with their legs, standing up successfully against all the odds.
                Vanessa was getting used to the feeling of being in control, drowning out the foreign motions that her body tried to make by adopting an extremely narcissistic mental attitude. She told herself that her own intentions and ambitions were the most important thing in the world, and no-one else’s could be given a moment’s thought. When her legs tried to move her away from the sorceress she stopped them in mid-air and returned them to the ground. When she wanted to put her arms down by her sides, rather than beating against her own chest, she filled her mind with a burning passion for relaxed biceps. She grew accustomed to the level of resistance, and adapted herself to controlling her body all over again.
                “Good!” the sorceress complimented her, inadvertently aiding the necessary self-congratulation. “Now, move this way. Two paces forwards and one to your right.”
                Vanessa obeyed, but only because she really wanted to go that way, not because anyone else had told her to. Muka also began to walk stiffly in the direction of the hunting party, slamming his ankle into a rock as Vanessa followed the sorceress’ instructions.
                “Ha! Perfect.” The sorceress said smugly with a cruel smile. All around Muka were hazardous outcrops, large boulders, and steep drops for the sorceress to play with. She advised Vanessa to move to her right, and Muka’s head crashed into a low-hanging outcrop. Next she asked her to sprint forwards and Muka launched into an unnatural and uncomfortable human run, straight through a series of prickly bushes and stinging nettles.
                Little by little the sorceress directed Vanessa’s motions around the riverbank, manoeuvring Muka into trips, bumps and scrapes as she brought him towards the hunting party.
                “Argh, cursed!” Muka and Vanessa would shout occasionally, mostly when Muka fell afoul of a deep puddle or perilous footing. Invariably, they would both laugh straight afterwards.
                “This seems cruel.” Robert said uncomfortably.
                “Do you need another demonstration of how cruel the giants can be?” The sorceress asked threateningly.
                “No, but you don’t need to sink to their level. We’ve been through this.” The professor said angrily.
                “All I wanted was a little catharsis. Come along girl, walk straight this way.” The sorceress said with resignation. Muka still tripped and bumped himself along the way, but the sorceress felt far less satisfaction.
                “Remain still now.” The sorceress instructed once Muka was a dozen metres away. “We needn’t bring him any closer, in case he feels a flash of assertiveness.” She stepped over to the frozen puppet-giant calmly and looked him in the eye.
                “I’m afraid I still haven’t forgiven you, Muka, and you got away rather painlessly last time.” She said flatly, eyeing the bruises and grazes that the puppetry had given him. “You are undeservedly lucky that I have such a strong moral compass alongside me.” She said with a glance at the professor. Muka was unable to reply, muted by Vanessa.
                “Try to stay still for a moment, Vanessa” the sorceress said as she started turning Muka to stone. It almost sounded like a polite request, distracted as the sorceress was by watching the stone spread.
                Once it was finished, the sorceress stood in the shade of her latest sculpture with a look of contemplation. Finally she spoke:
                “You may take the hand off your head now, Vanessa. It shouldn’t be difficult to remove.” She said, still admiring her work.
                Vanessa lifted her hands to her forehead, and cracks began to appear along Muka’s arms.
                “Wait!” the sorceress shouted suddenly. “Please, sit down first.”
                “Why? Will this make me pass out or something?”
                “Maybe. Just sit down.”
                Unwilling to take a chance, Vanessa sat down on the ground quickly. More cracks appeared around Muka’s midriff, spreading like a spider’s web across his body wherever Vanessa had bent or folded herself amid a creaking, straining sound. The sorceress watched with satisfaction as the damage spread throughout the stone. With every slight motion Vanessa made, the cracks and splits covering Muka continued to grow and widen, until the scraping sound of moving stone announced the departure of Muka’s head from his body. As it fell it bounced against his shoulder, shattering it in a spray of gritty grey. Unbalanced, his torso slid down to one side, freeing his other arm and pushing his hips forwards, and finally the remainder of the statue crumbled into a pile of loose rock and chunks of rubble.
                Vanessa yanked the pickled hand away from her head and dropped it with a sickened squeak.
                “Even those who don’t live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, Muka, not at me.” She muttered to the wreckage. She turned back to the rest of the party with an innocent smile. ”Whoops! Oh well, come along all of you. Three left.”

                 

                Vanessa joined Jake and Robert as the party walked along the bank of the river, discussing the surreal sensation of moving in a giant's body, with its rickets-inspired gait. Gerald stayed with the professor, since someone had to stop her walking off a cliff and keep her walking into puddles. The sorceress once again led the way, feeling around for the invisible traces which led her to the giants.

                The river meandered between steep slopes again, forcing the hunting party to adopt a winding path which frustrated the impatient sorceress. She still had so many new spells to test that the waiting between hunts was unbearable. She vented her frustration by firing magic wildly to her left and right as she went, scorching the grass, ripping holes in the earth, coating vast hillsides with dense brambles, and freezing a large colony of ants.
                “What about Tigoth, when did you turn him into a statue?” Jake asked her, as much to stop her blindly firing into the landscape as to satisfy his curiosity.

                “When I returned to the tribes to inform them that the giants would do them no more harm, I was confronted by the machinations of a scared mind with enormous strength. I’d scared him; the giant hunters had scared him; Urtoll had scared him; Tigoth had panicked. There was so much blood, so much rubble and destruction. He’d even gone to the effort tipping over all the buckets in town. It was a massacre. The second I was spotted there was screaming and wailing. I was declared the leader of the giants, an evil witch, the cause of all their bad luck, and an enemy of all good people. My denials weren’t even heard over the hysteria, so I left them to their sorrow and went to deal with the last monster.
                “I caught Tigoth at the head of the valley; he’d got lost trying to find me. He stood with his back to me, looking out of the valley with who knows what barbarous thoughts running through his head. I’d stood between him and a horde of murderous peasants, preached of his innocence and promised the tribes safety, and he’d betrayed me at the first opportunity. I had almost been taken in by his simplicity, confusing it for innocence and thinking the giants capable of altruism, but there he was, a savage and a murderer standing in the sun without a speck of guilt. He made me sick with anger and disappointment, in myself as well as him. I shouldn’t have let them roam free. I turned him into a sentinel where he stood since he’d already posed himself so perfectly, hands on his hips and guarding the entrance to my valley. He became my gatekeeper, and my message that I no longer wished to have visitors.”
                “So what about the peasants then, why did they attack you if the giants were all gone?”
                “Because they saw the stone effigy of Tigoth watching over them, and decided that everything must have been my doing – the giants’ existence, the attacks, the slaughter, all of it. I tried to help them, I tried to explain myself to them, and I got nothing but scorn and ignorance in return.”
                “You got some pretty awesome sculptures out of it.” Gerald said, looking on the bright side. Sadly, it was still too dull to illuminate the sorceress’ view.

                Geeda came into view after a few more winding turns in the valley. He was a distant speck, a spot of leathery browns and pale skin tones which resolved slowly into a humanoid shape as they proceeded.

                "He'll see us for sure if we continue with this path." The sorceress hissed with irritation.

                "Well maybe you shouldn't have worn a red dress and covered your arms in glowing writing if you were wanting to go unnoticed." Gerald suggested.

                "Watch your tongue lest it leave your head." She threatened back, Professor Taith glaring at her.

                "They're safe." The sorceress told her, completely misjudging her tone of voice if 'reassuring' was what she had been going for.

                “None of them are getting transformed this time. It’s been far too dangerous and you turned Vanessa into a murderer!”
                “She was already a mutilator.” Gerald said drily.
                “Silence.” The sorceress and the professor said together.
                The sorceress looked hard at the professor, who looked defiantly back. They held one another’s gazes for a solid minute, neither one speaking a word. Eventually, with the merest flash of disappointment and discomfort, the sorceress looked away.
                “They won’t be transformed this time.” It was an unexpected concession from the angry sorceress. “But I will need all of them.” She added suddenly, finding some of her commanding presence again. “And we will need to be stealthy.”
                The hunting party began to climb up the slope, rising above Geeda and using the rocks and bushes as cover. They crept along in single file, popping their heads up occasionally to check on their progress before dropping down into the undergrowth once more. Once they were close enough, the sorceress called them to a halt.
                “All of you, form a circle around me and hold out your hands.” She instructed the four students. They looked dubiously at one another but obeyed none-the-less. “Be ready, these won’t be light.”
                The sorceress closed her eyes and tensely splayed her fingers, the writing on her hands burning a bright white. From the ground around her, four thick wooden stems burst upwards, smooth and cylindrical. They emanated a red-black smoke, thick and acrid with a sticky heat.
                “Keep your hands out.” The sorceress warned “Otherwise something might go wrong.”
                The smoke was obscuring their view of the stems, but as it billowed and separated the students could see that the wood was morphing in one of the many ways they would have expected it not to. Familiar shapes flashed in and out of view behind the smokescreen. Their hands were starting to burn from the heat, the strange smoke staining their fingers red and black, but the sorceress’ warning carried power enough to keep them extended. There were few people in the world that these students would willingly burn their hands for.
                A groaning, cracking sound erupted from the smoking stems. Great clods of dirt were thrown into the air and the smoke rushed upwards and outwards, engulfing the students, forcing them to close their eyes against the stinging, hot cloud. All of a sudden, there was a weight in each of their hands, and the smokescreen dissipated.
                Each of the students were left there, stained and hot, clutching finely crafted, solid wooden weaponry edged in obsidian. They were decadent yet rustic, like a diamond studded plough.
                Gerald was tipped forwards, clutching a wooden great-hammer with a vast, square obsidian head. Robert held a dark-bladed claymore. Jake heaved his huge obsidian-edged battle axe over his shoulder for support. Vanessa was left grasping an obsidian headed flail, barbed and heavy.
                “Awesome!” Gerald declared, approving of the sorceress’ brave choice to arm them.
                “This is not safe!” The professor shouted angrily. The sorceress didn’t acknowledge her.
                “This is so heavy!” Jake correctly observed, vaguely lamenting the loss of his giants’ strength.
                “You… you aren’t expecting just to arm us and send us into battle with Geeda, are you?” Asked Vanessa, terrified of the prospect. She didn’t think that four ants with switchblades would be a threat to her, and by analogy didn’t feel particularly empowered.
                “Of course!” the sorceress said, surprised. “But you won’t be close enough to find yourself in harm’s way.”
                “I mean, the handles aren’t that long…” Gerald started suspiciously, but the sorceress raised a finger for silence.
                “All of you stand on that ledge over there and face me. Leave each other enough room to move.” She said, pointing to a rise a few metres away. The students scrabbled up and arranged themselves into a line, facing the sorceress. “When I say so, you are to swing your axe, Jake.” The sorceress instructed. Jake looked at her askance, and then adjusted his grip. The sorceress looked towards Geeda, making his way up the valley towards her home. She was filled with protective anger and thousand-year-old hatred. Holding one hand towards him, a strange twinkling appeared at his shoulder.
                “Now!” The sorceress shouted, her other hand directed at Jake. He hefted the weight of the weapon into the air and brought it soaring down in front of himself. The sorceress flexed her hand and in front of him, Geeda’s shoulder appeared as if poking through a window in the air itself. The blade of the axe cleaved easily through his cloth shirt and sliced into Geeda’s flesh; a shallow wound but easily inflicted. The window disappeared and Jake’s axe-head slammed into the earth. Distantly, they heard a yelp of pain from Geeda.
                “What the hell?!” Jake shouted.
                “You can make portals?!” Gerald asked, excited.
                “I can do a great many things. Is this safe enough for you, Taith?”
                “I… hmm.” The professor responded, too grumpy to admit that yes, it was.
                “If you can make portals then why did we have to walk all the way here?” Vanessa asked, annoyed.
                “All of you, be ready to swing on my command.” The sorceress ordered, ignoring the question and focusing again on Geeda. She shouted to Robert and a sword was thrust into Geeda’s ankle. Gerald crashed a hammer-blow into Geeda’s ear. Vanessa’s flail gouged into Geeda’s hip. Over and over the sorceress shouted their names in turn, twinkling flashes appearing around the giant and in front of the armed students. Like a swarm of bees in league with a skilled blacksmith, they struck at the giant with blades, barbs and impacts from every side, all from a perfectly safe distance. Even the sorceress herself started to join in, unleashing fire, ice and lightning through portals in front of herself.

                "This doesn't seem awfully honourable or fair does it?" Robert said eventually, resting himself against his claymore.

                "You'd prefer to face down the giant 'fairly'?" The sorceress asked.

                "No, no. But..."

                "You think that using one's enormous stature to physically intimidate and overpower a human is playing fair?"

                "Well I suppose not but-"

                His continued protests were cut off by a blinding gout of flame soaring into the giant's head.

                "Fair is irrelevant. There has to be a victor and that is always going to be the one with the advantage. You can either make sure it’s you, or you can end up as a statue in my valley. Now back to work."

                Distracted by the assault on Geeda, none of the hunting party heard the crunching and rustling sounds from above them. Two pairs of enormous eyes picked out the unmistakable blood-red colour of the sorceress’ robes, standing apart from the group of confused young warriors. Geeda was well beyond them, apparently being assailed by a terrible case of fleas. As quietly as they could manage, which was just slightly quieter than a shouting sorceress, the Urtoll and Brot snuck down the slope towards their old foe, not unlike a moderately sized church sneaking up on a cat.
                By the time any of them noticed the sounds of titanic footsteps, Urtoll had swept down with two massive hands and snatched the sorceress up, clutching her in both hands. He lifted her into the air, level with his face, and stared at her with a triumphant smirk and cruel beady eyes.
                “Got you now.” He said, and started to squeeze. “Help Geeda up!” he shouted to Brot, who ran down the slope in a cumbersome squat towards Geeda.
                The students looked on in horror at the utter abandonment of the ‘safe distance’ policy they’d been enjoying thus far. Suddenly, they felt a lot less intimidating with their new weaponry, and a lot more scared, displaying this by running quickly away.
                “No more magic for you! No more telling us what to do!” He laughed an ugly chuckle as he squeezed, crushing the sorceress’ bones together. The agony was crippling and all encompassing, filling the sorceress’ mind. There was no way she could concentrate enough to cast a spell and help herself.
                Professor Taith felt deeply saddened. She didn’t know who had started this vicious cycle of attack and counter-attack, but it seemed to her like the sorceress and the giants were just as bad as each other. There was no way she’d be standing around and letting the sorceress die though, not while there was strength in her body. Off to one side, where the students had been, she couldn’t help but notice a patch of giant hair in mid-air. The hair was mostly minding its own business, appearing in a perfect circle and hovering vertically, covering about the same height as a person. It was the last portal summoned into existence by the sorceress. Professor Taith took a tight hold of her satchel and ran at the hair as if it would improve her own scruffy perm.
                The professor dived through the portal and experienced the inconceivable sensation of instantly changing direction whilst soaring unaided through the air, and then landing in the greasy mop of hair found atop an incredibly old giant. There was a paper in this, she was sure.
                She grabbed a handful of the unpleasant brown hair in her hand to anchor herself and fished around in the satchel for a round, smooth, flat rune stone. There were several in her bag but only one of them would do the job, if she remembered the sorceress’ notes correctly. It needed the correct rune of domination carved into its surface. The first stone she found was the rune of conflagration, undoubtedly formidable but not quite the ticket here, since she wasn’t planning to die in a horrific, high-altitude follicle fire. The next was the rune of bards, but singing a great ballad was scarcely going to help. The third time, well known for being a charm, yielded her the stone she was looking for, sporting a symbol which reminded her of the letter ‘G’ despite looking nothing like it. She’d read an awful lot about this particular branch of magic, mind control, ever since she’d awoke this morning, with no memory of why she’d agreed to let the students act as magical test subjects. In fact, there had been a lot of questionable moral decisions regarding the students’ safety in the last 24 hours, mostly during conversations with the sorceress.
                Professor Taith clutched the rune stone in one hand and thought hard about the magic, allowing just enough power to seep out of the stone and into her to allow her to plant herself into Geeda’s mind. With a deep, anxious breath of uncertainty, she whacked the rock against Geeda’s scalp as if she was stabbing her own mind into his like an injection. Her consciousness felt like it was expanding outside of her own body, suddenly granting her an awareness of far too many limbs and a whole new layer of brutish thoughts. The thoughts did not seem best pleased about their new guest.
                The professor was pretty sure that Geeda didn’t want her here by the stream of profanity in his thoughts, but there was no time for being a polite visitor. She closed her eyes and reached out, fingers still clenched tightly around the stone, feeling for his legs. She found them, but her magic was amateurish and weak – taking control of the legs forced her to leave the arms and head under Geeda’s control. Focusing all of her attention on running, she pushed Geeda into a sprint, back towards the sorceress.
                Brot ran at Geeda, who pushed past him roughly, knocking him to the ground. This was dishonourable combat; a charge without warning or the proper ritual was disgusting behaviour. And to think, Brot had been on his way to help Geeda. Never again. He was for it now.
                Geeda could feel the irritation on his scalp where a historian was clinging to his hair. Running without wanting to was becoming something of a theme for the giant hunts, not that any of the runners would realise it, but Geeda knew that he could at least scratch the itch on his head. With his vast, stubby-fingered hands he swung upwards and clawed at his hair. Professor Taith felt a jolt of fear in her stomach and panicked herself back into Geeda’s arms, catching them just before a jagged fingernail carved into her. She forced his arms back to his sides, but he then stopped running.
                “Oh would you please just work with me on this?!” she pleaded with him.
                “Get off me sorceress! Your curses won’t stop me!”
                “I’m not the sorceress, you can see her you buffoon. And she’ll die unless you help me!”
                “Don’t care! Get off!”
                The professor gave up on her attempts at diplomacy and shot back down to Geeda’s legs, propelling him forwards again. They were closing in on Urtoll and the sorceress with every passing second, but she wouldn’t be able to survive the crushing for much longer. Geeda retaliated again by swinging his arms up to his skull, so the professor bent one of his knees unexpectedly to put him off balance. He stumbled enough to force his arms out in an effort to catch himself, then lurched forwards again. It was like a game of physiological chess being played against a simpleton with no grasp of the rules.
                They were close to Urtoll now, close enough to strike, so the professor took control of Geeda’s arms again and wound back for a haymaker, but Geeda pulled her own tricks against her and span round to face the other way.
                “Please, Geeda. This is important, more important than an ill-conceived judgement against someone you don’t understand!” The professor pleaded.
                “You use a lot of words. Like the sorceress. I don’t trust you. Get off!” He replied. The professor was a little concerned that he took the greatest offence to her being verbose, rather than enslaving his body, but there were more pressing matters afoot. She returned to the legs and faced Urtoll again, but then the hands went back to their old tricks, attempting to dislodge her so that she couldn’t remain in the legs for long.
                “For goodness sake! Just hit him! Then I’ll get off you.”
                “No! Get off me!”
                “Punch him and I will!”
                “No!”
                “He’s killing her!”
                “I won’t hit him.”
                That was it. The professor lost her temper with the overgrown child. She pinged to his legs and made him trip, then and shot up to his head.
                “THEN BITE THE FUCKER!” she shrieked out loud, in a foul-mouthed outburst that her students would tell tales of for years to come.
                Geeda toppled forwards, mouth wide open, and sank his teeth into the back of Urtoll’s head. With the shock of the pain, Urtoll flinched and clenched his fists harder around the sorceress with a sickening crunch. She screamed in his hands as she felt one of her shoulders pop; as far as she knew, one of them may very well have passed through the other, rendering the difference between left and right purely academic.
                The students stood and stared at the scene. The two giants were frozen into a tableau, Geeda’s teeth locked on the back of Urtoll’s head. Urtoll wore the wide-eyed expression characteristic of someone with a pair of jaws closed around their skull. He was in shock and unsure of how to react. Geeda too didn’t know what to do with his hands and legs. The professor had fled his mind immediately after tasting Urtoll’s hair, and now he was trying to work out exactly what was going on.
                After a few moments, Urtoll registered the situation. He dropped the sorceress, freeing his hands to stop Geeda trying to eat his head, and clawed at the mouth which was still firmly chowing down onto his scalp.

                The sorceress fell to the ground with a pained grunt. Mercifully enough, she had landed on her back in a patch of soft moss, rather than a collection of sharp rocks. There was no guaranteeing, however, that any local stones hadn’t simply fled the area before she landed, having heard of her reputation and picked up on the frankly terrifying concentration of rage inside her; rocks are terribly astute when it comes to picking up on the emotions of fallen women. The wrath boiling out of her was palpable, making the air thicker, blood colder, and any silences in the country instantly more awkward and uncomfortable. She immediately rolled to face Urtoll used her good arm to propel a wave of force into her former captor. The blast drove his head upwards into the disagreeable teeth, thereby worsening Urtoll’s already foul mood. The two knock-on effects of this savage attack were the onset of sudden and extreme dental discomfort in Geeda, and the serious unbalancing of the middle-aged academic who was already teetering uncertainly on a large head of unpleasant hair.
                Professor Taith wouldn’t have said that her balance was especially good at the best of times. She didn’t take part in any balance-reliant sports or exercises, and she always strived to keep two feet on the ground – more if possible. It’s understandable, then, that she felt less than comfortable when the towering giant, onto whose head she was desperately clinging, jolted backwards sharply. She’d acted in the spur of the moment to get up there, she realised that. Now that she had the luxuries of fear and time, she rapidly decided that the ground was the only place for her. It called out once again as a safe space with no peculiar notions about slapping her with a vast pudgy hand or falling over suddenly.
                With the choice to descend now made, it was just a matter of addressing the finicky details such as how to actually go about it, preferably without any involvement from ‘free-fall’ or ‘plummeting’. These matters were things she would usually leave as an exercise for the students at the end of a lecture, but this time she had to think about it for herself.
               
                As the sorceress stood up, her shoulder gave her a redundant reminder of why she was planning to do unspeakable things to Urtoll, the beast standing over her with a skull inexplicably covered in teeth. Her crushed bones were agonising, and further aggravated her by complaining that the attached arm was far too heavy these days. She let it hang limp and useless at her side for the time being, blood running along her fingers from the mutilated shoulder above, and levelled her gaze on the two oddly-behaving giants. She had never seen the likes of this before, and whilst she knew Geeda to be a feral abomination, he’d never taken to cannibalism before. What was especially odd about him was that there appeared to be a haggard woman completely over-complicating the process of climbing down his back.
                There was just no time for waiting around whilst a professor descended a scalp anymore. The sorceress had no idea how people managed to get themselves into these situations, but she was forever having to bail them out to get on with her life.
                She reached out with her magic and took hold of Professor Taith, flinging her off the giant’s back like a roving insect and then tearing a portal open below her. The professor found the whole experience to be an emotional rollercoaster for which she had never intended to buy a ticket, let alone ride. She had gone from significant fear to overwhelming terror to extremely scared confusion within a second, and then landed awkwardly in Gerald’s arms, dozens of metres away from her starting place in an instant.
                The sorceress was glad that she had taken the time to save the professor. Not on an emotional, altruistic kind of level about doing the caring thing and saving a life, of course. It was because reaching out magically had highlighted to her the presence of an amateur’s attempt at domination of a mind. Poor though it was, it had opened the pathway for a non-pathetic wielder of magic to take over; the mental gates already thrown open by a powerful arcane rune of her own creation. It also explained Geeda’s peculiar hunger.
                Urtoll wasn’t contented to have teeth in his head for very long. He looped his hands behind his head and clapped hard on his hungry adversary’s ears, dislodging his improperly placed jaws with a muffled yelp. Whilst this did provide Urtoll with a measure of relief, it sadly didn’t help him greatly in the bigger picture. Before he had so much as regained half of his balance, a huge unseen pressure hauled him over forwards, pressing his face into the ground, and held him there.
                A distant thumping sound echoed up the valley. It had been doing so for a short while, but everyone was too preoccupied to notice.
                With Urtoll held down, the sorceress lashed out with her magic again, surging into the Geeda’s mind and filling it like water flooding an abandoned mineshaft. These veins had never run so rich with knowledge and intent. As if it had always been his life’s purpose, Geeda charged towards Brot and roughly grappled him into a headlock, taking him by surprise. This was just another nail in the coffin of Brot’s respect for Geeda.
                Urtoll was pinned to the ground by the sorceress’ magic. She wasn’t simply holding him place either; the sorceress crushed him into the dirt with as much force as she thought he could take, plus a little more for her own enjoyment. He struggled to breathe against the unseen weight pushing his chest into the rocks, which seemed to have gathered underneath him in a display of solidarity with the terrifyingly angry sorceress. It also helped them to recoup the lost ground on their ‘painful landings’ quota.
                Urtoll felt that his bones would crumble at any moment; the sorceress thought that the giant might like a taste of his own medicine in that regard, but from the pained yowling sounds he was making, he didn’t seem to be taking to it at all. If anything, this treatment was proving to be detrimental to his wellbeing. That was OK though, because she had some medicine of her own for him to try.
                The thundering, pounding rumble from along the valley grew ever louder, fleshing itself out with other cascading, gravelly sounds.
                The sorceress’ work began with what felt like a gentle tug; a probing, testing, feeling force to work out were to apply pressure along Utroll’s bulging and muscular left arm. It was like digging through a plate of spaghetti before tugging at a particularly saucy strand. In Urtoll’s case, the carefully selected strand of pasta turned out to be the bones in his hand, and the sorceress pulled at them like she was trying to start a food fight.
                Urtoll screamed as much as the crushing weight would allow while the sorceress heaved magically at his skeleton. She yanked and tore at his bone, and he felt like his flesh would rip apart at any second. Every time her ruined shoulder throbbed she got a little angrier and pulled a little harder, and her shoulder throbbed often. Urtoll’s screams grew louder and more unseemly with every pull the sorceress gave. Her blind rage grew ever thicker, crowding the other thoughts out of her mind. She could no longer concentrate on where the students were, or on calming the professor. All that she could see was the monster that had led the giants, the giants she had freed and protected, against her. The bastard who had crushed her shoulder. The animal with the audacity to presume he would best her. She used her magic to yank his head upwards so that he faced her; she would have him look her in the eye as she did this.
                Whilst the sorceress’ focused rage fuelled her inner surgeon, it left her no attention to maintain the last of the portals, allowing it to fizzle out of existence. She also struggled to keep her grip on Geeda. He had been resisting the whole time, a consequence of the professor’s poor handiwork; the sorceress could feel him saying no to her, however ineffectual it had been. Damn it, the control magic was so sloppily placed and executed. It sounded like she’d even said please to him! There was no concentration left to put into this. The effort was much better spent on her partial amputation efforts, so she let the domination drop.
                The rumbling grew louder, engulfing everything as it rolled interminably onwards.
                                The hand bones were stubbornly and pig-headedly clinging to the inside of Urtoll’s hand, like the morning’s porridge to a bowl in the evening. They must have been entirely at peace inside that fleshy home, but it was time to cut the apron strings, plus many other things besides. Urtoll’s bones would have to live on the outside sooner or later. With everything else dropped from her mind, the sorceress allowed her vision to turn black aside from the agonised shape of Urtoll ahead of her. A feral, bestial apoplexy swelled up from within. She breathed heavily, almost violently, through her nose, like a bull preparing to charge at a lost tourist in the countryside, nostrils flared. Her eyes glowed with blue-white flames, like a second bull whose optician was woefully off-the-mark when it came to bovine ophthalmic health. With a shriek of raw, primal fury, like one of the previous two bulls doing an impression of an enraged sorceress with a chip on one shoulder about the other being crushed, The Sorceress of Thessalus rent Urtoll’s hand open from the inside out, and its bones were free.
                The skeletal hand floated above the imprisoned giant, dripping with gore and displaying its newfound emancipation. It was a false freedom, however, for it now obeyed a new mistress. She flexed its fingers, turned it around in the air, and examined her handiwork. Then, she balled it into a fist and sent it crashing into Urtoll’s cheek. The giant grunted and heaved for breath as the bones wheeled around and punched him again in the eye. Over and over again the skeletal fist slammed into Urtoll’s face as he lay helpless on the valley floor.
                Through all of this, the students had stood in dumb silence and horror, stunned into idiocy by the unbelievable carnage. The only coherent thought among them came from Gerald, who was genuinely anticipating that the sorceress would soon begin the age-old taunt of ‘stop hitting yourself’.
                Geeda had been fully mentally liberated for a nearly half a minute, but had yet to release Brot. Since the beginning of the grappling, Brot had called Geeda a wide array of shocking names, not all of them undeserved. This had made Geeda rather reluctant to let him go, lest violent actions should pursue those words. The repeated body blows that Brot was throwing at him even from the headlock gave these concerns no small amount of legitimacy. Eventually though, one strike caught him at a sweet-spot right in the diaphragm, and Geeda wheeled away in pain, winded. Brot staggered a few paces away from Geeda and rubbed at his neck; it was sore from the chafing of the sweaty arm, but still felt strong enough for proper combat.
                The two giants faced one another and prepared to charge, tucking in their heads and scraping their feet against the ground. Brot was going to make Geeda pay. Geeda had a strong, if unaccountable, desire to bite some skull.
                Suddenly, Geeda noticed a floating bone hand crashing into Urtoll’s face and stood up straight again.
                “Sorceress cursed Urtoll!” he tried to say, pointing towards the bludgeoning-in-progress, but he was cut off around syllable four by a skull crunching into his ribcage. Geeda and Brot tumbled to the ground untidily.
                “Argh! Get off me!” Geeda shouted from the tangle of giant limbs. The aftermath of the first charge in a fight was usually awkward.
                “Again!” Brot demanded, but Geeda was having none of it. He pressed both hands into Brot’s face and tried to push him away, which only made Brot angrier. “We help Urtoll! Then we fight!” Brot slapped Geeda’s hands off then turned to look at Urtoll. Bone was flying through the air, the sorceress had a glint of murder in her eyes, and Urtoll was in pain. Brot was forced to admit that there did seem to be an amount of cursing and sorcery going on.
                “Sorceress!” he bellowed, now that he had fully appreciated the spot of bother in which his companion had found himself. This drew the attention of the by-standing academics, but the sorceress herself was far too engrossed in her work. Even the added warnings from the students failed to reach her, lost as she was in her private haven of malice. Professor Taith began to fuss with more runes and parchments from her bag.
                The rumbling in the valley was close now, very close.
                Geeda and Brot placed their differences to one side and moved to help Urtoll. Geeda leapt over his injured companion and attempted to block the fist as it arced through the air, catching it in both hands. Brot ran straight for the sorceress. He lifted one foot high in the air when he was practically on top of her and stamped down hard.
                Professor Taith had almost been too late, fumbling over the incantations and runes required to cast the barely learned magic. Fractions of second before the giant’s boot hit the ground, the sorceress tumbled out of the air and landed upside-down by the professor’s side in a pile of notes, runes, and scrub grass. A lot of dirt landed with her. For a first portal it hadn’t been too shabby, however in her haste and inexperience she had also made the portal far too large and deep. She only realised this, of course, when the toe of Brot’s immense boot peeked its way through after the sorceress, and kicked the professor squarely in the head.
                The giants didn’t take long at all to notice the lack of a crushed sorceress underneath Brot’s boot, nor did Brot himself fail to notice that his toes were now several metres away from the rest of his foot; he just had an innate sense about these things. Geeda and Brot hauled Urtoll onto his feet and supported him from either side as the three of them rounded on the group of terrified, humans – the unconscious old woman, the young cowards, and most importantly the vilified, elusive, treacherous, stubbornly hard-to-kill, and injured Sorceress of Thessalus. She lay on the ground, still dangerous even in exhaustion, but injured and vulnerable. She had toyed with them, taunted them, imprisoned them, enslaved them, and denied them lands and food. In short, she was trouble; but not for much longer. There had been causalities in the pursuit of their game, but the Sorceress hunt, the greatest alliance ever known among the giants, would soon be over.
                Together, the three giants cast a dark shadow over the group of humans. The rumbling from behind them filled the valley, and the sorceress wore her mischievous smirk, a glint of power and spite still flickering in her eye. She snapped her fingers as the giants, still linked arm-in-arm, stepped towards her.
                The phrase ‘one step forward, two steps back’ is thrown around an awful lot in unproductive situations. The gravity of the effect is only really appreciated when experienced, however. The three giants had just been taught this lesson, finding themselves fifty paces away, back down the valley. The sorceress closed the portal in front of herself and laughed at them, before sucking air in through her teeth as the pain in her shoulder stabbed mercilessly at her.
                Urtoll was incensed. His foul-mouthed outburst was prevented only by a titanic stone fist crashing into the bite wound on the back of his head; a treatment considered wholly unsuitable by most medical professionals when dealing with a recent amputee. Brot and Geeda looked up in shock. Facing them was a stone statue, their equal in height, with an eerily familiar face; Tigoth. He didn’t pause to say hello. Another stone haymaker swung around, barely missing Brot as he ducked.
                “I… LIKE… BIRDS!” Tigoth bellowed as he grabbed at Geeda. Geeda wasn’t convinced that had done anything to harm any birds recently, but still dodged away from the grasping stone hands.
                Brot and Geeda both understood that flesh necks break more easily than boulders, which is why you never clear rocks from your home by charging at them. Clearly, they were great scholars among their race. Applying this knowledge, they grabbed one gargantuan stone arm each and attempted to wrestle Tigoth into submission, hopefully avoiding any more igneous impacts along the way. They soon realised, however, that he hadn’t come alone.
                Riding on the shoulders of the stone giant were a dozen smaller statues, statues who looked exactly like the little men of the valley. Using Tigoth as an over-engineered siege tower, the statue men ran along his arms and leapt onto the two giants. Yet more of the stone men were rushing along the ground to meet them.
                Geeda and Brot twisted and jerked their shoulders and torsos violently, attempting to shake the stone men loose whilst still containing Tigoth’s fists of stony righteousness.
                Urtoll giddily and shakily stood up again, vision blurred, head pounding and hand missing. The last few minutes of his life has been absolutely abysmal. Unable to think straight, all he could comprehend was that something hard had sucker-punched him. That something seemed to be held captive by Geeda and Brot, begging for a charging. Unsteadily, Urtoll backed away to get a good run up, set his legs apart, tucked in his neck, and prepared to attack. He focused on his target, held between the two shaking and flailing giants, apparently putting up quite a fight. Urtoll drew in a deep breath and then charged at full speed.
                Geeda screamed for Urtoll to stop, but his warning fell on deaf ears. The concussion had dulled his hearing, and deadened his perceptions. There was a trail of blood flowing from the stump at the end of his arm and he was running in a wiggling, almost serpentine path towards the restrained stone giant at an impressive speed. Brot and Geeds tried to lean out of the way as the strike closed in.
                Urtoll careened into Tigoth with a crack, a crunch, and huge shuddering impact. With a whole giant weighing down each of his arms, Tigoth’s body flew backwards and sheared off at both shoulders. Urtoll soared down with him, neck broken, and landed in an untidy heap of stone, bone and blood.
                Geeda and Brot regained their balance and looked at one another, each clutching a stone limb and sporting a look of deep shock. The stone men kept punching, pulling and tearing at them, but now the giants were armed and able to defend themselves. Using Tigoth’s arms as great clubs, the two giants thrashed and slammed at the ground, batting at the stone men who still flooded towards them. Fragments of stone from the weapons and statues alike sprayed out with each impact, stinging the giants’ legs as they hit and kicking up a cloud of dust and debris.
                Against their better judgement, but at the behest of the sorceress, the students were limping towards the battle. Gerald and Jake carried the unconscious professor between them, and Vanessa supported the injured sorceress. Together, the walking wounded of the hunting party headed into a stony slaughterhouse with swallowed fear and dubious confidence.
                After the initial shock and panic of the swarm, the giants realised that smiting little stone men using a severed stone arm wasn’t just effective, it was actually quite fun. By the time the hunters reached them they even had the gall to laugh whilst they were doing it. The sorceress had no time for that.  No time at all.
                She wriggled free of Vanessa’s support, cursing at her shattered shoulder in the meantime, and stood facing the fray. Her stone sentinels were falling all around, but some had still managed to hang onto the giants, clinging to their clothing like tiny pirates on poorly designed ships. She felt that perhaps the odds had better be evened up. Putting her hand to her throat she spoke again with a thundering, otherworldly voice.
                “YOU SHOULD HAVE KILLED ME WHEN YOU HAD THE CHANCE.” Her words echoed around the valley, and the students assumed that without access to cinema, she didn’t realise how clichéd those words were.
                She held her good hand in the air, and it shone with an emerald green glow. The stone sentinels on the battlefield began to grow larger, expanding like sponges in water as they drank in the sorceress’ green radiance. Those that had previously been struggling to hang onto the giants’ shoulders or back began to gain weight and strength, pulling down hard on Geeda and Brot. The giants quickly ceased to find the situation quite so amusing, as they lost balance and panic set in.
                Arms like stone vices wrapped around their bodies from all over, and more stone hands grabbed at their clothes and limbs. In a few short seconds, both Geeda and Brot had been disarmed and overwhelmed. The stone sentinels pushed the giants onto their hands and knees, with great stone fists holding their heads up by the hair, forcing them to face the sorceress.
                “Very few creatures get a second chance to try to do me harm, do you know that?”
                The giants nodded against the fists holding their hair.
                “It would have been a great testament to your intelligence if you’d ignored the second chance and gone about your business. You should have left my valley. Now, you’ll never get the opportunity.”
                Brot opened his mouth to speak but the sorceress fired a great swirl of flame into it. “You will be silent!” she shouted furiously. “I tried to save you all from yourselves, you animals. I tried to keep you safe from the little men in the valley and you repay me like this? What a waste of my time. I can make up for my mistakes though.” The sorceress turned her back on the giants and looked to the sky.
                “I have denied these men many lynch mobs, but I think they’ve earned this one, don’t you?” She snapped her fingers and the stone sentinels dragged the two giants over onto their backs. Thrashing and screaming in futility, Geeda and Brot were hauled off down the valley to face the justice of the giant little men of the valley.
                “Isn’t that a waste of giants?” Gerald asked without emotion, remembering the sorceress’ words when she thought she’d killed Urtoll the previous day.
                The sorceress waved her hand dismissively. “These giants are a waste. I’m better off without them.”

                Urtoll and Tigoth were still in a pile on the ground. The sorceress looked over at the fleshy, mutilated body with a ruined stump in place of a hand and a strangely flexible neck, and could feel that he was still alive. He was also in a lot of pain; this was a welcome development. She crossed over to him and stood by his ear.
                “You’re about to discover what I’ve found to replace the mercy I showed you last time.” She whispered. With wide arcing gestures from her good arm, the sorceress sprouted a spherical bramble cage around Urtoll, not unlike a tumble weed, and set it rolling back towards the cave.
                “You four. Your professor takes a dim view of my methods for forgiveness. Can I trust you to omit my acquisition of a living test piece?” She asked them, without allowing it to sound much like a question.
                “No idea what you’re talking about.” Vanessa said with a wink.
                “Professor’s sleeping on the job. It’s her own fault if she’s missing details when she wakes up.” Gerald observed. Jake and Robert nodded in agreement.
                “Marvellous.”
                “Are you going to be able to fix that?” Vanessa asked, indicating towards the sorceress’ shoulder.
                “It has served as a useful catalyst for vengeance, but it does require some attention.” She covered her shoulder with the other hand, wincing at the contact, and bathed it in a white glow. It spread out like a spider-web of gauze and tightened around the wound, pulsing and glowing slightly.
                “And the professor?” Gerald gentle shook the unconscious body in his arms to redundantly indicate who he meant.
                “Hm? Oh, yes,” She cupped both hands around Professor Taith’s face and the same glow enveloped her head. Groggily, the professor awoke in Gerald’s arms.
                “You did well for an apprentice, Taith. I think you could learn a lot from me.” The sorceress told her, as warmly as she could say anything.
                “Ugh, what happened to the giants?”
                “They’ve been hunted to extinction, a thousand years too late.”
                The professor tried to give a disappointed look, but couldn’t muster it. Her head hurt far too much from arguing with an imbecile and then getting stamped on.
                The sorceress looked at the still form of Tigoth laying on the ground. His arms had been broken into useless chunks of rubble during the fight, and the sorceress almost felt bad for him. He’d come loyally to her aid, through her domination or otherwise, and now he was a broken wreck. Using her magic, she levitated him back into a standing position and planted him gently onto his feet. Even without his arms, he was an impressive sight; an imposing warning to any who might enter her valley with ill intentions.
                “You’ll do fine just here.” She said casually to him, and allowed him to begin falling dormant, ready to wake when the next threat arrived.
                As the light faded on the valley, a flock of small birds, locked in a great discussion of their own regarding succession rights, landed on Tigoth’s shoulders. He could see them from the huge corners of his gargantuan eyes, hopping, flitting and whistling at one another. When his face finally set into a rigid mask again, it was wearing a stony smile.

Like me on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/IainReadAuthor/

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TomothyBabbage @TomothyBabbage

Support me on Patreon: https://patreon.com/iainread