Teagan stretched, yawning drowsily. She’d slept soundly, her tiredness from the previous night’s excitement helping her slumber without issue. Pushing herself to her feet, Teagan surveyed the nearby terrain, now visible under light of day. It seems she had chosen a somewhat difficult place to cross the mountain range at; while she had certainly chosen the point at which the ascent seemed to cover the least distance, it was also the point at which the ascent required the most vertical travel. The path ahead was steep, and Teagan wondered how the tomkins managed to cross it at all if even she struggled. Nonetheless, Teagan pushed doggedly onwards, past verdant pines and loose hunks of pumice and scoria. As Teagan drew nearer to the summit, her legs ached with greater intensity after each step, and her throat grew dry with every breath of the dry air. When the discomfort turned to outright pain, Teagan sat down to take a much-needed rest. Almost unthinkingly, the first thing Teagan did after taking a seat was retrieving the wooden box from her side.
The two tomkins inside were quite battered, but the sudden introduction of sunlight into their confines as Teagan opened the hinged lid of the box was more than enough to wake them both up. The man quickly forced himself up, staring angrily at Teagan, his miniscule fists balled in meaningless defiance. The woman remained prone, using one of her arms to weakly prop up her head. Teagan rolled her eyes as the man shouted at her, either too stupid to realize or too angry to care that she had no idea what he was talking about. Tiring quickly of his hoarse voice, Teagan wondered what she cared to even do with him; she didn’t feel like eating tomkins when she still had hardtack available, and there were all sorts of fun games she could play with this one while she rested. Just as she was about to start twisting the little guard’s arms off, Teagan heard muffled shouting coming from her backpack. Teagan lifted Sihil out of her pouch with a disgruntled sigh, being greeted immediately with a furious glare from the red-haired girl.
“DICITI!” shouted Sihil, stomping angrily on Teagan’s hand.
Diciti meant speak, or at least something along those lines, as far as Teagan knew. She was still somewhat confused until Sihil, almost quaking with anger, pointed at the tomkin guards in the box, who were now both staring, slack-jawed, at Sihil. Teagan, thinking for a second, found herself wondering the same thing as she assumed the guards were: why the fuck was she about to let a tomkin give her orders? Teagan needed to put Sihil on a tighter metaphorical leash, lest she step out of line anymore than she already was. Reciprocating Sihil’s glare, she roughly seized the man with her free hand, lifting him up towards her face. Sihil, only now aware of the mistake she had made, fell to her knees, prostrating herself on Teagan’s hand, crying for mercy on the man’s behalf. The man himself struggled furiously against Teagan’s grip, impressing her with his tenacity after being so roughly handled last night. Nonetheless, Teagan continued lifting him until he dangled above her mouth, which she opened as wide as she could manage. Sihil was practically screaming at this point, tiny tears rolling down her tiny face. Teagan, figuring that Sihil had learned her lesson well enough, nonchalantly tossed the man back in the box, leaving Sihil distraught but placated. Teagan, done with the man, turned her attention wholly back to Sihil. The girl’s chest was heaving as she struggled to catch her breath, which combined with the exhausted, distressed expression on her face brought Teagan a strange, esoteric delight that she couldn’t quite explain.
“Diciti?” Teagan teased, brushing the tomkin’s red locks out of her face in feigned sympathy. Sihil nodded unsuspectingly.
“Diciti your fucking heart out.” Teagan mumbled, dumping Sihil into the wooden box alongside the two guards before shutting the lid and setting off once more on her ascent of the mountain pass. Time seemed to drag on as slowly as it could, but progress was undeniable, and soon enough, Teagan was steps away from the summit. She was intrigued to see what was on the other side of the range, but was unsure what to actually expect.
As she crested the last rise on the path, Teagan’s face lit up, new vigor coursing through her tired body.
This side of the mountain range was nigh indistinguishable from the coniferous, lake-dotted highlands that lay opposite. The mountainous terrain shifted almost jarringly into a steppe of golden grass, forming a horizontal strip abutting the mountainside. The steppe, in turn, seemed to gradually transition into a reddish shrubland, presumably the desert the old man wrote of. The view was breathtakingly picturesque, the sublime yellow of the steppe framing the reddish desert beyond in a golden aura. Though Teagan knew little of the world’s borders before the tomkin incursion, she knew that this territory would have likely constituted part of the Republic of Pazsich, a collection of small towns that banded together in a loose mercantile confederacy. She knew that many smaller burgs managed to remain unnoticed by the tomkins, and wondered if she would be able to find any here.
Teagan’s descent was far easier than her ascent, but midway through it, she found an obstacle other than fatigue impeding her progress. Blocking the path downwards was a tomkin structure, nearly as tall as her and significantly wider at its base. The building, built of bricks hewn from the abundant loose rock in the area, bustled with activity, with tomkins busy tending to farms of miniature crops, hewing the stalks of woody shrubs into tiny planks, and washing various articles of clothing in a washbasin fabricated from a nutshell. Teagan could make out much less of what was going on inside the structure, but she was able to catch a glimpse of what appeared to be an ornate mosaic through a window. She didn’t have much time to observe, however, quickly ducking away and out of sight to consider what she’d do next. While precautionary logic dictated that she should just take the extra bit of time necessary to skirt the building, Teagan was intrigued with its presence, wondering exactly what its purpose was. The building, while perhaps architecturally and stylistically unique, seemed to be similar to a monastery in its general configuration and layout. As evidenced by the lack of nearby houses present, the tomkins working the fields nearby most likely lived communally in the structure, similar to a monastic order. Teagan found herself wondering exactly what parallels tomkin culture had to that to humanity. Did they value the same virtues? Did they worship the same gods? Did they prepare the same meals, paint the same art, play the same music?
Teagan’s curiosity got the better of her, and she decided to sack the building. It didn’t seem as if the tomkins inhabiting it were anything more than civilians, and she saw neither defenses on the building nor a single weapon on any of the tomkins themselves. Confident in her own personal safety, Teagan strode back into the open, wearing her most deceptively charming smile, a jaunt in her step. Teagan bit her tongue to stop herself from laughing as the tomkins panicked at her entrance, ringing a tiny bell somewhere in the building. The tomkins fled into the building as fast as their little legs could carry them, which, Teagan had to admit, was proportionally far faster and more impressive than anything a human could achieve. After the last few stragglers had rushed inside the building, the doors slammed shut, and the bell ceased ringing. Teagan took slow, deliberate steps towards the building, approaching until she stood close enough to tough it with an outstretched. She wanted to peek through a window, but didn’t want to deal with another eye injury, the first one having hurt enough already. Teagan, instead, decided to make her own window. Seizing a large portion of the building’s roof, she pulled upwards with as much might as she could muster. She wasn’t able to achieve a solid grip, however, and despite her best efforts, the ceiling remained firmly affixed. Her efforts didn’t go unnoticed, either - Teagan heard a chorus of screams and shouts coming from within the building as she pulled, which subsided into quiet murmuring as her hands slipped away, unable to find a hold on the smooth, angled roof. Not ready to give up just yet, Teagan instead decided to target the weakest point on the building, a large pair of wooden doors, reinforced with thin metal crossbars. It only took a single spirited punch on Teagan’s end to blow the tiny doors off of their hinges, revealing a huddled mass of tomkins inside. Teagan noticed that all of them were dressed in the same drab brown garb, young or old, man or woman.
“S-salviti...” Teagan stuttered, remembering the tomkin greeting taught to her by the Eucharion fellow last night. The tomkins inside the building erupted into a clamor at her invasive introduction, a good deal of them scattering around the building’s interior. One of them, an older man with a shaven head, approached Teagan, storming out the doorway and facing her outside. She was surprised at the man’s bravado, impressed that he’d leave the meager safety offered by his building to confront her in the open and shout at her in a language she didn’t understand. Teagan, quickly tiring of his shouting, reached a hand down to nudge him out of her way. He responded by hurling what appeared to be a miniature ball of fire at said hand, singeing Teagan’s thumb and causing her to recoil sharply, now wary of these tomkins who at first seemed so benign.
“Whoah! Ow! You fucking burned me! I only broke your doors because you all r-”
Teagan was abruptly cut off as the man threw another orb of flame at her, this one leaving a ragged, charred hole in her newly looted trousers.
“Alright, that’s it!” she shouted, leaping at the man. He was clearly unprepared for such quick retaliation, his confidence draining away in the fraction of a second it took for Teagan to pounce on him, flattening him under her forearm with a cringeworthy crunch. Teagan’s attention returned to the building as she felt something sharp prick her scalp. Her attention rose to the windows of the building, from where the tomkins were pelting her with an array of ineffectual projectiles. A few of the tomkins even had little bows, although they did little to deter Teagan compared to the composite bows used by the tomkin soldiery. As soon as Teagan drew near the windows to retaliate, the tomkins hurriedly rushed away, leaving Teagan extremely disgruntled. With her harassers gone for the time being, though, she was able to lower her attention back down to the doorway.
Too frustrated to go through the motions of trying to calm the situation down, Teagan simply reached through the door, barely wide enough to fit her arm, and grabbed a writhing mass of tomkins. Methodically, Teagan stripped them one by one of their robes before shoving them in her mouth, taking little time to savor their futile struggling as they slid down her throat. While the crowd near the door had scattered completely after Teagan reached in the first time, she was ready to once more pit herself against the building. Backing up so that she could get a running start, Teagan lined herself up with the bell tower on the building’s right side, hoping to first destroy the spindly protrusion and continue to disassemble the building from there. With a powerful exhale, Teagan hurled her shoulder into the bell tower. She was pleased when the tower offered almost no resistance, practically exploding against her weight. Seizing the opportunity, Teagan used the newly created hole as a handhold to pry at the roof, this time with a firm grip, and almost immediately succeeded in tearing away a large portion. The panicked tomkins inside scattered to the stairwell, heading back to the ground level, but not until after Teagan managed to snatch a few in her offhand. Her cruelty and voracity now unrestrained, she lifted a particularly tall boy to her mouth, seized his legs between her teeth, and bit down with as much force as she could muster, filling her mouth with blood and severing his legs from his body. She tossed the boy’s mangled body aside, spit out his legs, and moved on to the next tomkin in her hand, a brown-haired girl with wide eyes and soft, rounded features. She was sobbing furiously as Teagan began squeezing her, slowly applying more and more pressure; continuing mercilessly as her ribs cracked, her arms broke, blood gushed from her mouth, and she let out a final gurgling sob before expiring. Teagan decided that she’d take things a little more slowly with the next tomkin, a portly man with grey hair shaven in a manner resembling a priestly tonsure. Dropping the body of her last victim, she picked her new target up in her right hand.
“We’re gonna have some fun, you and me…” Teagan breathed at the terrified man, biting her lower lip in anticipation.
The man was beating at Teagan’s closed fingers and trying to squirm out of her grasp, panting heavily between hoarse shouts. Teagan popped open the lid of her box to deposit the other few tomkins she had snatched inside before using her newly freed hand to draw her knife. The man went silent for a few seconds upon seeing the knife, the blade of which was taller than he, before he resumed his shouting with redoubled volume and effort. Teagan pinned him to the wall of the building with one hand, and began cutting away with the other. She started with tiny incisions, drawing her knife across each of his arms, his legs, his chest, forming tiny beads of blood and pulling guttural wails from the man’s throat. When the man, exhausted, grew unresponsive to these smaller wounds, Teagan sliced a long, clean incision across the man’s stomach, sending blood dribbling down his robe and bringing him back to full consciousness. Teagan went over this cut again, this time slicing even deeper. She was a bit surprised when the man’s innards popped out from the wound, but found a strange delight in the man’s face as he realized that he was truly dead. He reached out with a trembling, bloodstained hand, weakly trying to put his guts back into place, but it was of no use given both the extent of his wound and his apparent weakness. Teagan, after sheathing her knife, knocked him unconscious with a hard flick to his temple, leaving him to bleed out.
When Teagan finally turned her attention back to the building, she was incensed to see that a great deal of the tomkins had apparently snuck out while she was busy with the victims in her hands, with the last of them already seconds away from reaching cover in the mountain grass. Teagan was too fatigued from her ascent of the mountain to give chase, and so she half-heartedly resumed tearing down the deserted building, taking her time to inspect it now that its inhabitants had fled. She found two rooms that rather intrigued her more than any of the others. The first seemed to be a treasury of sorts, a small locked chamber filled with tiny plates and goblets cast from precious metals, miniature bronze-faced shields, a few small sacks of coins no larger than grains of sand, and a handful of wine casks. Teagan drank the contents of the wine casks, the entire stock adding up to just a bit more than a draught for her, and emptied everything else into a pocket on her rucksack.
~
Iacchus, though Selcenian by birth, had served in the armies of Q’thuman for nearly four winters as a tracker and a pathfinder. In all his time, he had never before seen a sight like the one that lay before him now.
A day earlier, his division had marched forward to answer a relief call for a battalion ambushed by Caeni savages who had somehow gotten their hands on a method to travel from the Old Land. They were too late, arriving only in time to treat the wounded. Many of these wounded, however, said that a giantess had strode out onto the battlefield, seemingly learning the words for various objects from a girl she carried with her. Iacchus was incredulous, but the story was corroborated when Iacchus found the tracks of a giant going around Nystagmenos lake. Bringing a few skirmishers and a scribe with him, Iacchus followed these tracks. He was unprepared for the first thing he’d stumbled on: the remains of a Caeni village, utterly razed, strewn with the crushed and mangled bodies of dead tribespeople. It was a terrible thing to behold, but at least it meant that his division wouldn’t have to fight any battles. Iacchus’ curiosity wasn’t quite sated, however, and he continued to follow the tracks left by the giantess, trailing them further and further northwards, towards the Stele mountains. It was after continuing along that path for another few hours that Iacchus stumbled upon a sight that would jar him for days.
Propped against a splintered ebony tree was the dead body of a giant. A huge sharp stone, caked with dried blood, sat on the ground next to the corpse. The giant’s head was completely caved in, its face destroyed, a lumpy mass of protruding bone fragments and decaying flesh. Iacchus was unprepared for such a sight, but his curiosity persisted as he noticed a strange detail about the scene, one he struggled to understand. A cone-shaped segment of grass, facing away from the dead giant, was entirely flattened as if pushed down by a great weight.
“Write it all down.” Iacchus murmured to the scribe at his side.