The Ineffable Ones

See: Giant Cosmology INDEX, Giants INDEX

What a Giant Is #

The first thing to understand about a giant (any giant, anywhere in Rolara) is that the word giant is a mortal word, coined by mortal scholars trying to fit something the size of a thunderhead into the same conceptual box as a tall man. The word does not survive contact with its subject. A goliath is a tall man. A storm giant is not. A storm giant is a fact about a mountain, expressed in flesh.

The Ineffable Ones is the term used by those few scholars (most of them in the libraries of Tatharia Capitolina, a smaller number in the monastic archives of Lohastambha) who have given up on trying to make giants legible and decided to describe them honestly instead. The name is a confession. It admits that the thing being described cannot be properly described, and proceeds anyway.

What follows is the closest thing to a working definition the discipline has produced.

The Three Properties #

A being is a giant, in the cosmological sense Rolara’s scholars use, if it possesses all three of the following properties. Anything that has only one or two is something else: a tall person, a large monster, a god of unusual size. The three together describe a category that includes the Mythekin, the Storm Giants of Thal’orim, the Stone Giants of the Shattered Peaks, and a small number of beings whose names are not safely written down.

Largeness #

Not “tall.” Large in the way that a coastline is large, or a season. A giant’s size is not a measurement; it is a category of presence. When a true giant enters a valley, the valley adjusts. The wind goes around the giant differently. The light bends. Animals that ought to flee instead orient themselves, the way iron filings orient toward a magnet, because the giant’s presence has briefly become the most significant feature of the local geography. This is not magic. It is what being a giant means. The largeness is not a fact about the giant’s body; it is a fact about the giant’s relationship to everything else.

The most reliable way to know whether something is a true giant or merely a very large humanoid is to watch what happens to the air around it. If the air does nothing, the thing is large but not a giant.

Slowness #

Giants move at the speed of intention, and their intentions form on a different timescale than mortal ones. A storm giant who decides, on a Tuesday, to walk to a particular ridge may begin walking the following spring. This is not laziness. It is not even hesitation. It is the natural pace at which a being whose lifespan is measured in millennia forms decisions whose consequences will outlast empires.

Mortals consistently misread this slowness as one of three things: stupidity, contemplation, or sleep. All three are wrong. A giant deciding whether to lift its foot is engaged in the same cognitive operation as a mortal deciding whether to invade a neighboring kingdom. The stakes feel comparable from the inside. The fact that, from the outside, the foot is just a foot, is a failure of mortal scale to perceive what the giant is actually weighing.

The corollary is that a giant which moves quickly is a giant in extremity. Speed in a giant is the equivalent of a scream in a mortal. It means something has gone catastrophically wrong, or catastrophically right. There are accounts in the Lohastambhan archives of Mythekin moving at a running pace exactly twice in recorded history. Both times, the world changed.

Unknowability #

This is the property that gives the Ineffable Ones their name, and it is the one that mortal scholars find hardest to accept. A giant’s interior life (its motivations, its preferences, its loves and griefs) cannot be reliably inferred from the outside. This is not because giants are hiding anything. It is because the categories mortals use to organize their own interior lives do not map onto the categories giants use to organize theirs.

A giant does not “want.” A giant tends. A giant does not “decide.” A giant settles. A giant does not “love” in the way a mortal loves; a giant includes, the way a mountain includes the trees on its slopes, without ownership, without preference, without the option of stopping. When a giant takes a particular interest in a mortal, the mortal is not being chosen. The mortal has become, for reasons the giant could not articulate even if asked, part of the giant’s slope. The relationship has no analogue in mortal experience. The closest mortal scholars have come is the relationship between a coastline and the particular shape of its bay.

Vaasha, the last sentinel of Thal’orim, is the only living giant well-documented enough to test these descriptions against. Her behavior (laughing at humanoids as if they were the antics of fond children, tending Silverswirl Glidewing chicks for sustenance with the same hand that could level a tower, speaking only in the guttural tones of the Giant language) is not eccentricity. It is what an Ineffable One looks like when it is being patient with mortals. The patience is real. So is the abyss across which it is being extended.

“Typically Benign” #

The phrase appears in nearly every scholarly treatment of the Ineffable Ones, and it is always presented with the qualifier typically. This is not academic hedging. It is the most important word in the entire discipline.

Giants are, on the whole, not malicious. They do not hate mortals. They rarely attack mortals. When asked (in those rare cases where a mortal speaks Giant well enough to ask), they almost always express something resembling fondness for the smaller peoples who scurry through the lower altitudes of their world. The Mythek Massacre, the most cited counterexample, is a special case driven by disease and external aggression, not by anything intrinsic to giant nature.

But typically benign is not the same as safe. A giant who decides, with the best of intentions, that a mortal village is in the wrong place will move the village. A giant who has noticed that a particular river ought to flow a different way will, eventually, change the river. A giant who finds a mortal injured in the snow may pick the mortal up to warm it, and the mortal may not survive the picking up. None of these are acts of cruelty. They are the actions of a being whose scale of intention does not naturally include the fragility of small things.

The mortal who survives a giant encounter is almost always the mortal who understood that the giant did not mean any harm, and got out of its way regardless.

Why They Are Mostly Gone #

Rolara today is a world with very few visible giants. The Storm Giants of Thal’orim have departed, leaving only Vaasha. The Stone Giants of the Shattered Peaks are believed to have left their mountains, though this belief should be examined with care. The Mythekin endure in the regions around Mount Origin, but in numbers far smaller than ancient records suggest. The other kindreds, the ones whose names are not safely written down, have not been seen in any era a living mortal can remember.

The standard scholarly explanation is that the Age of Wonders ended, the Stars of Power were sealed, and the giants (being beings whose entire mode of existence depended on the free flow of the aetheric currents) withdrew from a world that could no longer sustain them at full capacity.

This explanation is probably true, and probably incomplete. The Ineffable scholars (the small school of Tatharian thinkers who specialize in this material) have proposed an alternative reading: that the giants did not leave so much as slow down further. A giant’s slowness is already measured in seasons. After the Stars sealed, the slowness deepened. A giant that takes a year to lift its foot in the Age of Wonders may, in the present age, take a century to do the same. From the outside, this is indistinguishable from absence. From the inside, the giant is still here. It is simply taking longer to be visible.

If this reading is correct, the Shattered Peaks are not abandoned. They are slow.