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GIANTS

Read across the codex

Motifs

An encyclopedia gives each giant its own page and stops there. These are the shapes that recur: a single eye, a world built from a body, the people who came before, in traditions with no route between them. Recurrence is not evidence of contact. It is the interesting part regardless.

Crossing cultures

Found in one tradition so far

  • The first and the last

    A primordial pair bound to opposite poles of the same cosmology: one marks the world's beginning, the other its end, and each is best read next to the other.

  • Set among the stars

    The dead giant is placed in the sky as a constellation, which keeps the story visible every clear night.

  • Made, not born

    A giant forged rather than fathered, from bronze, clay or craft. It raises the question of whether the thing is alive at all.

  • The devout enemy

    An opponent of the gods who is also learned, generous or genuinely devoted. The tradition refuses to make him simply wicked.

  • Pursuing the sun

    A giant who races, shoots at or swallows the sun, and generally does not survive the attempt.

  • Rumour of our own time

    A giant reported in living memory, circulating through soldiers, forums and video. Unverified by definition, and revealing regardless.

  • Knowingly tall tale

    Exaggeration that never asked to be believed. The audience and the teller are both in on it, which makes it a different kind of story.

  • The river came from a giant

    A watercourse is explained as a giant's tear, blood, urine, furrow or dropped burden. The river is permanent, so the explanation has somewhere to live.

  • Buried under fire

    A giant is pinned beneath a volcano or a lava field, and the mountain's activity is read as the body still moving.