A dark and cloudy night.

Perhaps 2 a.m., sometime in the past.

“Should we raise the alarm? You saw that, didn’t you?” the watchman had a long grey beard and wild eyes. His old shoulders trembling, he motioned to the much younger watchman nearby.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw it I saw it… still tryin’ to make sense of it. What are we supposed to say?” The younger one couldn’t believe what he saw, but the panic coming from the old guy wasn’t helping, the third could barely speak, white and pale as the moon.

“I don’t know, man, look at Meral! Look at him! He’s seen a demon!” The old man said, whiskers waggling in the wan light of the stars, pointing to the third watchman whose eyes stared like wide saucers out into the wilderness.

Meral was looking out into the wide black forest surrounding their fortress. He had seen something, but his feeble mind and lips couldn’t decide how to say it. His lips were quivering, barely forming the words “gi…giant….giantsss…”

They heard what sounded like a large tree falling in the distance. Perhaps.

“Yah’see? Look what they did to ol’ Meral! He can’t even talk! Sound the alarms and let the Kingdom rain down on these creatures from the abyss!”

The young watchman lit the torch, it was his duty to run to to the pylons and light them should there be invaders on this section of the Eastern Wall. The pylons had stood unlit for centuries, guardians and watchmen on the walls of the Kingdom keeping her borders safe and free of invaders for generations. If he was to signal a false alarm, it would break a tradition that went further back than his own grandfather…

“Fallon! Wake up, son! How about ‘a giant man-thing just crawled up out of the ground out in the forest’ how about that?! What else are we supposed to say?! GO! Sound the blasted alarm!”

They heard a crashing thud in the nearby distance.

This time it was not a tree falling nor any other sound but footsteps, large, deep, and heavy against the stillness of the forest floor.

Then a second thud.

And a third.

Something very large was walking, no, running this way.

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“Oh heaven help us, GO Boy!!” Old Man Whiskers shook Meral, who had now fully fainted leaning up against the stones. Their campfire blazed against the coolness of the evening, but somehow it was colder than ever before. Meral didn’t move no matter how much Old Man shook him; meanwhile Fallon sprinted along the top of the wall with the torch in one hand, sword in the other. Fear and tension filled his face as he breathlessly ran to the pylons to light them afire, signaling to the protected world that there was a new threat to their once peaceful life.

A whizzing sound cut through the evening air, like one whistling a sharp tune.

“FALLON! DOWN BOY!!!”

A gigantic boulder crashed into the reinforced concrete walls splintering wood, stone, and framework in all directions, just a few feet closer and he would have been crushed.

Another thud, thud, thud. It was getting closer. Fallon grabbed the torch from the ground, still burning and dripping oil and left the sword where it lay. He was still half a length of wall away from the pylons and should another stone hit in front of him…

Another whizzing sound, this time much further away, crashed elsewhere into the wall with a sickening crunch.

They were under attack.

The shockwave rocked the boy as he ran, almost dropping the torch over the side of the wall into the depths 200ft below. More thuds.

He was within feet of the pylons when he saw them: monstrous silhouettes out in the moonlight more than twenty feet tall. Even at this distance, so far up, he could see their imposing forms tearing across the countryside, some dragging large iron structures that resembled swords, others dragging giant trees stripped down into clubs. Some resembled large men with equal arms and legs and lumbering across the earth as mindless as they seemed. Others slithered or bubbled or slid large oily forms across the earth, a mix of monster and what had once appeared human.

They were unearthing chunks of rock and boulder and stone and launching it upwards to the wall, as easily as children throwing pebbles for fun on a sunny afternoon. He heard the volley as it came, whistling missiles of death in the night sky.

Something inside him knew he wasn’t going to make it those last ten feet.

Large chunks of trees hit the wall, sending splinters through everything in sight and a hundred miles and hour. Fallon’s leg was torn clean off as wood splinters as large as his arm flew past him boring holes in the wall like bullets from a gun.

He screamed. The torch still burned bright but he was no longer able to move.

The section of the wall had fallen down, crushing his only good leg.

The others would have to be warned. His vision started shifting, to visions of his mother and his father. The pylons were within feet, he had dragged himself across the stones but still…

He fell once, letting the torch tip on it’s end, the oil mostly burned through as the rags and dry wood had eaten through what supply there was. Now almost embers, the torch still flickered.