It had taken Shaella most of the night, and had cost the Staff of Malice all of its power, to undo the magical barrier that King Balton had created around the island of Coldfrost, but the deed was done. Once the boundary’s soft, static hum finally ceased, the breed giants came stampeding off of the island like the half intelligent, half feral beasts that they were.
Straight across the deep and sluggishly powerful river channel they came, with little to no regard for the freezing temperatures and the deadly current. More than a dozen of the hairy man beasts ended up floating stiffly out to sea, trampled, drowned, or frozen solid by the icy-cold water. The smartest of them, the older males, and the naturally protective mothers, waited on the other side with their children. They came across in the sunlight, at a safe, shallow ford. There was a narrow place, a few miles upstream from where Shaella had vanquished the barrier. There, one of the younger, brighter males boasted that he could make a bridge. It turned out that one wasn’t needed. The water there never reached more than knee deep.
The wildest of them, the toothy, crazed males, driven by rage, and testosterone were already ravaging the nearby villages and towns, and we’re slowly working their way south in small packs. The biggest and meanest of them though, the smarter, more terrifying self-proclaimed leader of all of the Breed Giants, was leading a band of his kind to Locar, to complete the bargain they had made with the Dragon Queen.
Bzorch was nearly ten feet tall, and like all of his kin, his body was covered with a thin, yet course fur, everywhere save for his face and palms. Bzorch’s fur was light brown in color, and still thick enough for him to be considered young; but the grayish white patches along his spine and chest, showed his maturity.
A lot of the breed giants were born with white or silver fur. It was much harder to tell the ages of those beasts. All of them were large, had wide, wet snouts, and jutting lower jaws. Their mouths were full of ferocious looking teeth that tore into raw flesh easily, sometimes the flesh of their own kind.
Bzorch had fought ruthlessly with dozens of contenders to become the alpha male. Lately though, the challenges had ceased. His hard, and violent victory displays, where the loser was dismembered and consumed before those that chose to watch such combats, had gone far to dissuade further attempts to take over his role.
The breed giants hadn’t been cannibals until King Balton had imprisoned them on the island. Up until then, they had hunted the northwestern arctic for bear, wolf, and lazy tusked seal. They eventually ranged far enough inland from the icy coast, to stumble upon some of the true giants’ herds, and some of Westland’s northern most villages. Herds were devoured, women were raped, and men and giants were killed. Eventually, the breed started eating the flesh of the two-legged creatures they had killed. This wasn’t cannibalism yet, for they were neither men, nor giants, and the taste of man flesh was succulent. It drove them mad for more.
Lord Brach and his hearty northern troops, hunted, tortured and did everything they could to dissuade the beasts, but the Breed eventually lost all fear of humans. They were the hunters, and the men were their prey. That’s when King Balton stepped in.
The kingdom folk thought the Breed were half-bears, or the fabled Yetin. The fact that they were obviously two-legged, mannish creatures that were capable of semi-intelligent thought, was the only reason that King Balton and King Aldar had agreed to spare them from complete annihilation.
The giant king claimed that they were a mutated form of a race called the Wedjakin, which hailed from beyond the other side of the Giant Mountains. What had caused them to turn so violently feral was unknown to the Giant King though. There was a hope that the wildness would eventually breed out of them.
Bound to the island of Coldfrost, the beasts couldn’t kill, rape, and savage the good folk of Westland, or plunder the giant herders’ flocks any longer, and that was all that really mattered to the two Kings. On the island, there was little to hunt, and the bitter climate made growing anything impossible. Soon, the Breed beasts were forced to resort to eating each other to survive. The transition from human and giant flesh to the flesh of their own kind was easy to make, but the fact that they had been forced to that extreme wasn’t easy for any of the sentient ones to forget. Especially Bzorch.