I step onto the portico where in ancient times my brothers and I would stand to greet the dawn, long before men and their ilk ruled Toril. Now, I hardly dare to peek at the light upon the stones, and only from the shade of a pillar larger than I. My palace stands upon a jetty of sunlit rock, its sides flanked by a chevron of abyssal shadow that points toward the sundered figure of Othea’s stone body. It almost seems she is giving birth still; the two halves of her craggy figure have fallen wide apart, creating a broad cleft that is filled with the crowning orb of the blinding yellow sun.
Silhouetted against the shimmering disk stands a figure the size of a hill giant. Something is familiar about his shape, but it is the axe that keeps me staring into the searing dawn. The obsidian head swallows light as dragons swallow gold, and even half-blinded, I see every figure carved into the ivory handle: Stronmaus smashing moons with his mighty hammer, Hiatea thrusting her flaming spear into the heart of the fifty-headed hydra, Iallanis joining the hands of Memnor and Karontor in brotherly love.
Sky Cleaver!
It cannot be. No mortal can wield my father’s hand axe; its magic would destroy me. Yet, I would know the weapon anywhere; it is impossible to mistake Sky Cleaver. What are you doing to me?
“As you wish. But don’t expect me to condone your treachery…”
“… slice you open and feed your entrails to my swine, and there’s nothing you can do…”
“… last time! No more, my husband. Away, away with you forever…”
Do you wish me to fail?
No matter. Even you cannot stop mighty Lanaxis, for I have allies of my own. I turn and point to the drumlins where my poisoned brothers have lain these three thousand years.
“Arise, my brothers!” I call. “Arise, cowards! You who in life would not defy faithless Othea, arise now and serve the Mother Queen again, in her death and yours!”
First one, then two, and a moment later many low groans echo across the barren plain. The drumlins crack like eggs as the bejeweled fingers of my dead brothers push up through the snow. Their hands are not skeletal, but emaciated and black, as flesh becomes when it has been frozen for three thousand years. One after another, their heads pop from their snowy cocoons and look toward me. Tufts of ropy hair protrude from beneath their dirt-crusted crowns. Their faces are as withered and dark as their hands, with yellow teeth showing through their ripped lips and puckered eyes that hang from the sockets like shriveled apples.
I point at Othea’s cleaved body. “Take vengeance for the sundering of our mother,” I command. “Go and punish the one who has defiled her legacy!”
My brothers rise and obey. They are no match for Sky Cleaver, of course, but I suspect neither is the bearer. And even if he is, the delay works to my advantage. The day is not long in the north country, and twilight shall return soon enough.
One by one, the dead giants climbed from their scattered drumlins and stumbled toward the sundered tor, their golden crowns and bejeweled rings too rimed with dirt to sparkle in the morning sun. There were more than a dozen of the kings, one for each true giant race that had ever walked Toril. When the world was young, they had been immortal monarchs, born of gods and destined to rule their progeny as long as Ostoria endured. Now they were mindless zombies, called back from a restless sleep by the same brother who had poisoned them.
Tavis did not fear so much as pity them the indignity of this second betrayal. Despite their shriveled flesh and the grotesque disfigurements wrought by so many centuries of lying frozen beneath the plain’s barren soil, Tavis recognized many of them from ancient stone giant tales.
The tallest, wrapped in a cloak of the whitest linen, would be Nicias, dynast of the cloud giants. Behind him was red-bearded Masud, khan of the fire giants, his dark armor glimmering through even the thick layers of dirt and ice crusting the steel. Next were Vilmos, paramount of the storm giants; Ottar, jarl of the frost giants; Ruk, chief of the hill giants; Obadai, sage of the stone giants; and several others, among them the progenitors of some races that had not been seen in the Ice Spires since before Hartsvale was a kingdom. In their black and withered hands, all the monarchs clutched ancient weapons of splendor and power.
“Hiatea watch over us!” Galgadayle was standing with Tavis and Basil between Othea’s sundered halves, looking over the verbeegs toward the drumlins south of the tor. “We’re doomed!”
“Yes, we are,” agreed Basil. He was looking in the opposite direction, toward Bleak Palace’s looming mass. “By the time we finish with those cadavers, twilight will be upon us.”
Tavis said nothing. He knew better than to think he could defeat all of the dead giant kings, even with Sky Cleaver in his hand. The weapon’s defenses would age him to dust long before he could strike half of them down. Still, the titan had been appallingly haughty to call his own victims to his defense, and there was always a way to use an enemy’s arrogance against him.
A cry of fear went up from the verbeegs. Tavis glanced back. The giant kings had stopped well short of the tor, and now they were raising their weapons over their heads.
“Grab hold of me!” Tavis hefted Sky Cleaver. He had no idea whether the axe would protect his friends, but he hoped that if they were close enough to him, the attacks would also be deflected around them. “Don’t let go.”
Nicias whirled his pearly morningstar over his head, spraying a cloud of boiling white vapor toward the sundered tor. In the same instant, Vilmos brought his sword down on the plain, Ruk smashed his ebony club into his own palm, Masud pointed his flaming spear at Tavis’s chest, and a dozen different kinds of cataclysm struck the tor. The air turned as foul and thick as arsenic; sheets of lightning swept across the plain to crackle and dance off Othea’s battered stones; great rifts opened in the ground, and earthquakes pummeled the mount; fire gusted through the cleft like wind, reducing everything it touched to ashes and smoke.
Through it all, Tavis stood motionless, watching in gape-mouthed awe as Toril herself groaned and wailed in complaint. A savage, biting cold rose from Sky Cleaver’s handle and hovered about his body. He felt his skin wrinkling and folding over his flesh, his shoulders stooping beneath the weight of years not yet gone, his bones aching with rheumatism he had not earned. Yet no lightning touched him, no fire scoured him, no poison seeped into his breath; with the world itself ending around him, he did not fall.
At last, the cataclysms ceased, and all that lay between the giant kings and Tavis had vanished. The icy plain had become a torn and churned wasteland, with no sign of the verbeegs or anything else that had cowered there. Except for the stones beneath his feet, Othea Tor herself had crumbled to dust and blown away. Even her abyssal shadow had vanished, save for a single purple shaft at the base of the boulder upon which he stood. And there, lying at Tavis’s feet and clinging to his legs like frightened children, were Basil and Galgadayle. The eyes of both ’kin were white with shock, their expressions as void as the ground around them, their mouths gasping for air.
Seeing that their foe still stood, the giant kings lowered their weapons and started across the wasteland. Where their magic had failed, their strength would not.
“Your brother has made fools of you!” Tavis called. He gently freed his legs and turned to face Bleak Palace, which still stood proud and tall behind Ottar, the frost giant, and Obadai, the stone giant. “He murdered your mother, he poisoned you, and now he has summoned you from your rest to serve his foul purpose.”
The giant kings continued to approach, their shriveled eyes vacant and blank.