Giant

From the peaks, looking down¶

A giant will step over a war rather than around it.

This is not contempt in the way other peoples practise contempt. There is no sneer in it, no effort. A giant regards the affairs of smaller peoples the way you regard the politics of an anthill in your path: real, presumably urgent to the participants, and not a reason to alter your route.

They say so aloud, too, when asked. Not to provoke. They are simply answering the question.

Mountains move, given time¶

Giants expand the way stone does. Not by cataclysm, and never in a hurry: by pressure, applied for longer than the opposition can remain interested, until the shape of the land has changed and no single season can be blamed for it.

A settlement is not legitimate to them the day a marker goes up. It becomes legitimate once the land has been worked long enough to carry their mark, and there is no ceremony for the moment it happens, because the moment does not exist. One century the valley is disputed. Some century after that, it is obviously theirs, and the dispute is a thing in somebody's archive.

They cultivate the arts of stone and storm and hold themselves the true heirs of the world. It should be noted that no other people has ever managed to argue them out of it.

An agreement, not a nation¶

Giants have no throne and have never wanted one. What they have is the Stoneheart Concord, an agreement of long standing among most of the peaks that settles boundaries, adjudicates claims, and does nothing else whatsoever.

There is no Concord army, no treasury and no law beyond the arbitration of ground. Giants outside it are not rebels, they are giants who have not needed the arbitration, and several of the oldest and most respected individuals on the map have never attended a session in six hundred years of life. Foreign envoys who arrive at Cairnspire expecting a court find a hall, occasionally in use, and no one authorised to speak for anybody who is not present.

Why there are so few, and why it has never mattered¶

Giants live six hundred years and bear children more rarely than any other people in Valdrin. There have never been many of them. There has never needed to be.

This works out to a strange kind of arithmetic in war. Losing a giant is a generational catastrophe and an unremarkable afternoon for the enemy who managed it, which is why giants do not fight wars so much as decline to be finished. Kill enough of them and you have not won. You have merely postponed something, and they have the span to wait out the postponement.

In your settlement¶

A giant is worth several workers at anything that turns on mass and worth very little at anything that turns on delicacy or diplomacy. Housing one costs more. Feeding one costs a great deal more.

Replacing one is, on any timescale you personally will experience, impossible.

Their tolerance of other peoples is the poorest in Valdrin and it is enthusiastically reciprocated. Every giant in your colony is a wager that what they can lift outweighs what they will cost you in grievance everywhere else, and that wager is settled not by you but by whoever governs after you.