THE GIANTS IN THE HILLS

The Cerne Abbas giant stands proud and rather smug on a hillside. The man who originally carved the giant was also a proud and rather smug man, who proclaimed it something of a self-portrait until several of his very close acquaintances pointed out certain significant issues on the question of proportion. Distressed and embarrassed, he threw his tools away, left Dorset, and became an itinerant pedlar who ended up being voluntarily eaten alive by ravens on a hill in Staffordshire while a circle of children sang a very old song, but that is another story.

There are other giants carved into our hillsides, but you will not see them. The carvings are deep in the rock, or they are carved in ways which only the gifted are able to see, glittering like veins of ice in the dark.
There are six people in this land who know how to wake these giants and bring them out of the rock and earth if they are needed, and one of those people is very ill indeed. So if a gaunt elderly man approaches you in a pub and asks you to put out your hand, be very careful about doing what he asks. If you do, he will drop a piece of white chalk into it, and then close your hand around it. In that moment you will become one of the Six, and you will have all the knowledge of the rock and the earth and the ways of seeing.

But you will also know what the giants are there to protect us from, and that is a terrible burden to carry.