In the Eastern forests of the Firwood four friends were preparing to set out from the small cabin they had taken as shelter as the frigid gusts of winter had appeared in blizzard and then departed with the meekness of an embarresed wombat.
‘Hey guys, come look how great Carrick’s hat looks on this horse!’ said Aya, laughing heartily before sneezing out a dark plume of smoke that hung for a moment in the still air and slowly began to land like pepper upon white snow. Dropping to her knees Aya began to cough, spitting up a knot of ash that boiled and evaporated, finally forcing her admit that she was fairly sick.
‘You can’t come with us,’ the guard captain spoke soberly despite having already drunk half a flagon of whiskey, ‘smoke signals are fairly poor form when scouting; don’t worry though, we’ll just head east for a few days and you can stay here. If we find nothing we’ll pop back. Rest up, you look awful.’
‘And you look like a rusted out potbelly stove.’ Aya muttered walking back into the cabin and collapsing into the hearth, the embering coals managing to cool down the Lundrian’s temperature somewhat*.
Carrick, who was vainly trying to retrieve his hat from the horse, turned to Sunny, his friend and reluctant postman, ‘how do I make this beast give back my hat?’ he said, jumping up only to be thwarted by the horse lifting its head slightly.
‘Dunno,’ replied Sunny dreamily, ‘I think it makes him look dashing, we should get hats for the other ones too, ooh we could get buttercup a sun-hat!’
Seeing no help coming to his aid, Carrick waved goodbye to Aya and climbed up onto the wagon in a huff…he loved that hat.
***
Some days later the group emerged from the forests and for the first time looked out across the Easten steppes. Distance in these windswept fields of unwavering grassland had a habit of playing tricks on eyes not yet used to looking into the void of an impossible horizon, but it was when the man casually pulled a tree from the ground and used it to scrape the mess of a barn from his shoe that the group realised he was actually quite beyond what was normally considered tall.
‘A giant!’ gasped Carrick, more for his own benefit than for the information of anyone around him; the friendly looking family standing next to a tiny model village, now seemed all the further away and in the same moment all too close. Without effort they crashed through the village and bounded toward Carrick and his two friends. ‘Oh. They’re jogging over to kill us.’
Suddenly, a whirling flurry of blades and swearing launched itself up the closest giant’s trouser leg and, with coordination far beyond what should be possible for a drunk man, the guard captain emerged from beneath a collar bone and rode the stunned titan back to the ground with the hollow look of a jaded lumberjack. Hopping off the giant who was now rather dead but still startled enough to say the word ‘oh,’ the captain belched a heady cloud of whisky vapour and then winked at Sunny, ‘lass, my thanks for delivering me here, I always have trouble getting to a war unless it comes to me,’ flicking a coin Sunny’s way he then turned around and pointed a come and get some look at the next giant.
Furious that she had been tricked once again into delivering a person, Sunny threw up her arms and sighed with the eternal frustration that only a postman or garbage collector could ever experience, ‘they’re called taxis you dolt, they’re not that expensive…’ Failing to catch the coin, she hopped from her broken cart and began to untangle her nonplussed horse.
The aftershocks of the first giant’s fall now quelled, a small crack had opened up in the ground and a tendril of light slowly wicked its way outward.
‘Is that?’ Carrick began, halting in his cowering and fighting past the nausea. On tiptoe he edged toward the light as slowly as movement would allow and then with an expression of pure terror-filled wonderment he peered closer at the anomaly and felt a flutter of joy that he had only recently begun to notice whenever Aya laughed. ‘The weave…Hey Sunny, stand back. I’m going to try and do magic.’
‘I thought you needed a spell book? Wait are you actually a wizard?’ Sunny replied, raising her voice against the building percusion of magical dysphoria.
‘This is more of a manual approach,’ said Carrick, wincing in pain as he clutched at the unfathomable weave of light holding existence’s fibres together, ‘think of it as like brushing a horse’s teeth by way of its tail, no matter what it was always going to be messy and fairly unpleasant for the both of us.’
He had felt this weave once before, long ago, under the light of a candle and the enthusiasm of caffeine, he had almost lost a hand while coiling a single thread around his fingers in an attempt to study his construction. A lowly wizard, such as himself, played with frayed ends of the weave, attempting to shape its magic through words and arcane scribbles alone; It sometimes felt to Carrick as if he was trying to read a cookbook published by an ignoramus who had yet to understand the potato, everything was always deciphering, guessing measurements. It was only now, holding the full weave of magic within his hands, that he realised all his life he had been trying to knit a blanket with a spatula.
‘Knitting needles,’ he whispered under his breath as the weave flowed and rolled across his fingers.
‘What’s that?’ Sunny yelled as a synesthesia-like burst of sound went all in for orange and purples, ‘Did you know that your eyes are glowing, is that supposed to be normal?’
‘Sunny I think you need to run, I’m going to try something rather stupid.’ Carrick shouted as he fumbled in his satchel for a piece of paper. Without pen a single word began to form upon the blank page followed by a set of initials.
‘I’m not leaving without you or the guard captain.’
‘Would you mind posting this for me then,’ Carrick smiled, floating the letter over to his friend in a puff of moths and burnt toast crumbs, ‘the mail must be delivered I’ve heard.’
***
With two friends left behind and a single piece of mail in her hand, a postman flew from the field faster than any tear could run. Her new horse–wearing a floppy hat and made simple from headbutting a tree some days earlier–galloped on without sign of self preservation as the flat road began to incline downward.
***
Lifting the weave upward Carrick watched as the winter sun illuminated a glow upon the fabric that had created it, such a simplistic pattern was never seen to be so beautiful, the entirety of life existing in weft and purl, ‘this must be why the Giants come here,’ Carrick muttered, unable to look away from the golden threads he held in his hand. No matter what they’d always return, they’d march further and further West until all the land was theirs, all this beauty. With a sigh he closed his eyes.
‘And under the shadow of a mountain we shall be hidden then.’
A single daisy sprouted from the earth beside Carrick, lifting from the dirt below and stretching upward as if to embrace the sky above. So too did the ground then stretch and grow: a pillar of earth building itself and rolling upward with a grandness unbeheld by any man or canny goldfish since. In seconds a single mountain peak did stand from the ground, gripping the sky with a thunderous crack of magic that webbed disharmously against the fabric of normality. So too a second mountain appeared, pulling itself from the earth with symphonic might; a third; a score; an entire range formed across the land and thus a wall was built.
The giants, in horror, then cried the bells of retreat, for it was said that nothing was to be greater than them, nothing should ever be able eclipse their might. For the first time in their history the giants were…
small.
*Lundrians, a race born within the radiance of the everburning flame, had long ago made the feat of walking across burning coals substantially less impressive.
-J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 