Giant

Name: Giant
Classification: Man
Nation of Sizus
Resources: Coal, Jade, Nickel and Iron

Best-suited class: Brother of Air [Druid]
Primary Attribute: Stamina
Secondary Attribute: Strength/Constitution
Racial Bonuses: Polearm wielding and air elemental magix

HISTORY

The Sky-Rooted People

In the dawn-mist before iron or ink, the first Giants woke beneath the five Sky Roots, titanic pines whose trunks pierce the cloud-line and whose roots drink from underground suns.  From those roots the Giants pulled marrow-white flint, and from the cones they shook seeds the size of boulders.  They named themselves the Yettin (those who do not bow), and swore an oath to the trees: they would take nothing from the earth that could not be returned before the next turning of the star-pelts.

Flint, Fire, and the Hollow Bone

Giants never smelted ore; they invited stone to change shape.  Knapping is a conversation; tap, listen, wait for the flake to sigh.  A flint hand-axe of Yettin make is serrated like a dragon’s smile and can split a mountain-goat hair mid-air.  Pottery is unknown: they burn hollow mammoth bones into bowls, and when the bowl cracks they grind it into pigment and paint star-maps on cliff-faces that can be read only from the sky.  Their highest craft is the thunder-ball a perfectly spherical stone the height of a man, rolled off ridges during storms so that lightning will lace it with fulgurite veins; such stones become the hearth-heart of a new tribe.

The Four Borders of Quiet

The Yettin do not claim kingdoms; they claim views.  Each tribe watches one horizon and greets trespassers with the same neutral riddle:

“Cloud or stone, which holds the other?” Answer wrongly and you are gently lifted, set outside the border markers. Answer correctly however, and you are offered a bowl of pine-tea, then forgotten.

North: Draconian border—the Glass Dunes, where desert sand fused into knife-edged sheets under ancient dragon-fire.  Giants walk barefoot here; the glass sings when they step, warning the serpents overhead.

South: Centaur border, the Rolling Ridges, endless hill-country.  Giants and Centaurs race the storm-fronts for sport; the winner keeps the rain.

West: Dwarf border, the Sky-Roots themselves, whose bases knot through dwarf iron-seams.  Dwarves mine around the trunks; Giants prune above the clouds—an unspoken treaty older than either race.

East: Gnome border, the Moss Labyrinth, a knee-high forest of bonsai oaks and crystal creeks.  Giants kneel to drink, and gnomes swing on their beards to harvest dew; no words are exchanged, only nods.

The Star-Pelt Turning

Once every nine human generations the star-pelts (constellations) return to the same sky-position.  For one lunar month all tribes walk to High Yett—a plateau where the five Sky-Roots seem to braid together.  There they speak aloud every promise broken and every debt unpaid, then bury the words under a cairn taller than a castle.  The cairn is left to weather; when the next turning arrives it must have vanished—wind, rain, and root returning stone to soil—proving the Accord is intact.  If even one flake remains, the Giants believe the world will end in thunder.

The Small-Folk Wars (an outsider foot-note)

During the Great Wars the Draconians tried to chain Giants as living siege-engines; the Centaurs sought to break the Sky-Roots for spear-shafts; Dwarves coveted the fulgurite spheres as lightning-rods; Gnomes merely wished to measure the diameter of a Giant’s eye.  All failed.  Giants picked up the invaders, carried them three days’ march, and set them down facing their own borders.  No battle was fought, no treaty signed—only the whisper: “Cloud or stone?”

GOVERNMENT

The Giants obey no kings, councils, or scrolls of law; they follow the Aloof Accord, an oral covenant carried on the wind. Each tribe—rarely more than thirty souls—owes allegiance to the sky it watches and the Sky-Root it camps beneath. Decisions are reached by Stone-Circle, a gathering where every adult plants a fist-sized flint on the ground: the direction and distance the stone rolls is read as the will of weather and root, not as majority rule. Once the stones settle, the matter is considered finished; dissenters simply walk uphill until the horizon changes and the question no longer concerns them.

There is no succession of chieftains. A tribe’s Cloud-Speaker is whoever first hears thunder from a clear sky; when that omen comes, the former Speaker pockets a shard of fulgurite and steps aside. The new voice may be male, female, young, or ancient—it matters only that the sky has chosen. Speakers mediate disputes, but their authority lasts only as long as the next storm; when rain ends, the circle of stones re-forms and the tribe returns to equality.

Inter-tribal harmony is maintained by the Root-Share: any tribe that eats the heart of a Sky-Root pine must plant three of its seeds in view of another tribe, ensuring no single group can hoard the source of flint, pigment, and hearth-magic. Outsiders mistake this for generosity; Giants call it “keeping the world upright.” Thus their governance is not rule over people, but stewardship of horizons, an endless, patient balancing act between cloud and stone.

CHARACTERS

Usar Cloudtree : The tribal elder during the great scourge and widely considered the most influential leader of the giants.