Frost Giants

A rare, substantiated rendering of a female Frost Giant in traditional shepherd garments, espying her Cerulean Mountain home. Note the proud, confident demeanor, the natural materials with ornate trimmings, and the imposing battle-staff, likely fashioned from an uprooted oak.

Deumana survivors of the Schism

The enormous humanoids who occupy the neigh-unreachable Cerulean Crown mountains beyond the northern Waste of the Continent. Kin to the extinct Deumana, they roundly defeated and then survived them by taking shelter in their impregnable mountains. Reports note diversity in their shape and size, but typical sightings declare them to be symmetrical humanoids, roughly twenty paces tall.

Deumana are historically recorded to have been equally majestic, alien and awful in their countenance. In contrast the Frost Giants became grizzled by time and toil. Sporting beards and wild hair, they robe themselves in furs and homespun cloths, and are bulkier than their former kin, having hunted and worked the land. Significantly, they managed to rekindle the ability to procreate without artificial aid. The latter required they accept impermanence and decreasing infant sizes, and more injuriously, a higher infant mortality rate. The alternatives were extinction, or resorting to Deumana-style methods of genetic control. They chose mortality.

To sustain themselves the Giants long ago adopted a pseudo-pastoralist lifestyle; they hunt the Verge Plains beyond the Waste for prey, maintain permacultured food forests in underground caverns and valleys, and shepherd Megafauna stock. They are deliberate in their actions, and philosophers to the core, enjoying their own company and often traveling alone for spans of time. Their hierarchy leans towards matriarchal, but not unreasonably so. See Philosophy and governance.

Perhaps due to their self-imposed exile, their subsequent isolation, and the ensuing Rotations, the Giants are practically mythical to common Lumians; the Gardeners and select Slenders alone retain some level of communication with their race. The ageless Gardeners hold a similar outlook to life to these introverted titans, allowing the two cultures to trade news and information, perhaps a few goods in the process. This keeps the Giants informed despite their isolation, and supplies the Folk with rare materials only the Giants can procure. Slenders have communicated with these recluses on occasion, generally through an Endolithic intermediary, but have thus far been unable to establish diplomatic relations. The nightmarish hazards of the Waste keep their cavernous society well-buffered from prying eyes.

Big as the hills, steady as glaciers, wise as monks, and bloody vengeful if some twit nicks one of their calves.

Rarely do Frost Giants wander down from the Cerulean Crown to the more temperate Inland Forests. The subject of this field portrait must have had dire reasons for doing so.