K'rar had woken up from his trance and found himself in a cistern. Everything was white. He had been seeing snow for the first time. He was warm, though. The Nephilim had covered him in heavy, rigid furry clothing that K'rar knew wasn't from a sheep even though it was white. Still, the air was a bit too thin, and it did not take him long to understand he was at the summit of the Red Mountain, high up in a peak. Which wasn't surprising, considering his knowledge about the Nephilim. K'rar had taken his time to acclimatize, and after several minutes, had begun to shout. He had figured the giants had no intention to bring him harm. They had not smacked his small head, and they had covered him in the skin of a white bear, which he knew about but had not seen. They'd even given him warmer boots.
After some time, the large face of a giant had stared down at him, long after he had stopped shouting and was sitting in the base of the cistern. He had not seen it at first, until a wooden trough slid down to him along the side of the cistern wall. The giant had said to him to sit in it, which he had done, and he'd been pulled up. Without saying a thing, the giant had lifted him out of the trough, and begun to walk to the entrance of a very large cavern. K'rar had said,
'Why did you bring me here? Am I your prisoner?' but the giant had remained silent. Then K'rar had stopped following, and the giant had looked back at him. He had then retraced his steps and given K'rar a push, which was tender for him but an arrogant shove to K'rar. K'rar had then led the way into the cavern. In the other direction of the cistern, K'rar had seen the edge of the flat ground where he was standing, and confirmed he was high up in the mountain. The cavern he entered had high, domed walls that were evidently carved out by conscious process. He was like a small sheep while the giant behind him was the shepherd. Where he took ten steps, the giant made about three or four strides, and he had to wait for K'rar to walk some distance ahead before lifting his own leg. The cavern was sufficiently illuminated. Even when it became darker down the tunnel, the other end became closer, and when K'rar had come to it, his jaw had sagged in awe. He was standing in the entrance of a gargantuan basin, a crater carved out of the mountain in the shape of a stadium. There were snow-covered shapes of chairs all around the circular arena, but only the ones near the base were occupied. By 23 giants. 23 giants were sitting in one special front row, made of only 24 stone seats. K'rar imagined the 24th seat belonged to the giant who had brought him, and indeed, while he gasped at the fearsome, yet awesome, sight, that giant walked to that seat and sat down. All were clad in the same type of clothing; white linen dresses with serrated hems just under the knee, and woolen coverings around their chests and around the back, made from the same material K'rar himself was wearing. The garments were sleeveless, exposing the massive hairy arms. They also wore mittens with holes at the tips of the fingers. The shirts had a middle sleeve exposing part of the giants' chests, held together by a few strings. The top was separated from the lower body by large leather belts which also served as weapons' belts as K'rar had seen from before. Their feet were shod in heavy leather-and-iron boots, which K'rar thought looked like military boots. The Nephilim did not have weapons with them here. At least eight of these giants were female, and K'rar spent many minutes examining these. In all his pictures of mind he hadn't once visualized a female Nephilim. Like the male ones, they, too, were just like large humans, and were of course more finely edged than their male counterparts. All had black hair, and K'rar thought he picked up the scent of sweet-smelling oil that would have been used for their hair.
While K'rar tried to make a sense of things, which took him the most part of ten minutes, the giants remained still in their seats, and not once did any of them make so much as a twitch. But all of them were closely looking down at him. At long last K'rar figured he had to step onto the finely polished porcelain floor of the arena, so he did, and the Nephilim did move this time. To place their right hand on their chest. Then for the next minute he had waited for someone to speak, and when they hadn't, K'rar had said,
'I know you can speak.'
This had been the signal they'd been waiting for, because the female giant in the center of the arc of 24 seats, where she sat with a male counterpart, replied. She said,
'Are you the king who was promised?' her voice was heavier than a human female's, but feminine nonetheless, and suitable for a beast of her size. This female was older, by K'rar's assessment, than the other seven females on the panel.
'What? No, I am not the king. Where am I?'
'I was not referring to the king at Zadok, son of Caspar.'
'How do you know that?'
'What?'
'You called me the son of Caspar.'
'So, then, you are the king who was promised.'
K'rar looked around the faces of the giants, and said,
'Can somebody please elaborate?'
The male giant next to this female one said,
'Tahwan, the scroll.'
K'rar recognized the giant who had come down to Zohaltiel.
'So your name is Tahwan. You're the one who came to the valley.'
'My name is Tahwan,' that giant reiterated, and then began to read from the scroll, which he introduced as the decree of the Most High that He made regarding the sons of heavenly rebels, 'Ihanga, Ihanga, who is slow to anger and abundant in loving-kindness, says thus about the Nephilim of old: I know that it is injustice for the child to pay for his mother's sin. Therefore, whereas they have all inherited this sin, I shall grant them life at the end of 607 years by means of a son of man. The son of Caspar, a man of noble birth, shall lead them back to his land, along with many tribes and peoples, a great multitude of them, and that is where these offspring of badness shall live out the rest of their days, as the Most High pardons them for their error.'
'Does this prophecy regard you? Are you the son of Caspar?' the male giant asked him once more. K'rar was repeating portions of the scroll just read in his head, and he could in no way deny the precision with which each word did refer to him.
'My father was Caspar von Balian. King of Korazin, where I come from,' he said, 'I have not told anyone about this in this strange land, because I had no intentions to return there. But your scroll says that I will lead you back there.'
The female giant had leaned forward from her seat, and after a short pause said,
'Why have you no intention to return? Are you not the king?'
K'rar had then narrated his ordeal back there, explaining how he wasn't suited to protect his people from the traitors and the invaders, and how he had failed in his efforts to retain his throne. The moment he mentioned Klaadia the naiad, there was a uniform shock around the arena, and he had paused,
'What?'
'Klaadia. Klaadia was our mother.'
K'rar recalled to mind the last words the naiad had said to him about her sons, and then everything began to make sense. K'rar had said,
'Oh my God. She said I would know who her sons were if I met them. You are the offspring of spirits and people, aren't you?'
'Indeed, son of Caspar. The union was unnatural, and so the Most High confined us in this cold tundra. And then we had sought glory for ourselves, and traveled down to rule mankind. The Most High defended them, and they reduced us to a small number. But our forefathers sent some of us to sleep, and we have been waiting for you as sleeping giants, as it were, all these years, 607 years.'
'But, alas, even if we live when you live,' said the male giant leader, 'we cannot do so for long, unless you take us back with you where you came from.'
'I am not king of Korazin anymore. I cannot protect you.'
'Yes, you can. It is your destiny, Son of Caspar. You are not like us, who sought great things for ourselves, and sat on the throne that wasn't for us. Your enemies are like us. They must be crushed, and the Most High will give them into your hand. Besides, I know that your kingdom was snatched away from you. Does it not bother you to even imagine what they are living through in your absence?'
The giant was right. K'rar could just imagine the Goldorans invading even people's homes and beating them up like slavers.
'But, I do not have the capacity to return. I have no armies, nor allies, nor…' now K'rar made sense of something else. All his knowledge that he had been collecting and all his concepts, he had been collecting for this purpose, not just to fill a book.
'Behemoth,' he said, and chuckled at himself, and then said to his new friends, 'so, the Most High has been leading me to this all this time? What does he get in return?'
'We do not know, son of Caspar. The Most High will reveal it in his own time, to you.'
But K'rar thought he already knew what this Most High wanted from him. K'rar and Korazin and Moab at large knew nothing of this god. Perhaps he wanted K'rar to bring Ihanga to the people of Moab. K'rar himself had never considered himself religious, at least not for Ashtoreth.
'If I am to return to Korazin, I need to be able to remove my enemies.'
'So, then, will you return there?'
'It appears it is by providence that I must,' said K'rar, 'and I think I have an idea how we will return, and how I will regain my throne. But it will take some time, even years.'
'Then,' the female giant had said, and stood up so that K'rar had had to crane his neck even higher. All the others had stood up too, and together they had left their seats and stepped onto the arena in the same arrangement as their seats, in an arc. They had then fallen on their left knees, and placed their right hands on the standing knee, and their left on the ground, 'then, we the Nephilim would like to be part of your kingdom. We are under your service from this moment on, Your Majesty.'
K'rar said in his heart, what the hell? But then he was looking at the first 24 men and women in his army, and they were the equivalent of 100 human warriors.
These events had taken place three years and some months ago, and K'rar was still in the mountain by himself with them. He had disallowed them from stealing from human settlements the moment he found that the mountain was home to herbivore game that they could feed on. Besides, the giants were able to survive on a single meal in a week, having very slow metabolism. He had ordered them to return the humans they had originally abducted too. It turned out that this frozen wasteland was actually endowed with resources that the first giants had made use of, including exactly what he needed to build the first item on his long list of devices: metal ships. And so K'rar had stayed in the north with them to build what he called the Behemoth, a giant ship with a capacity of more than a thousand. He always believed that domination of the sea was the key to crushing belligerent aggressors like Goldora. On the sea, he could substantially cripple their economy. K'rar had also found that the Nephilim were efficient, excellent workers. They could work all day long without resting, regardless of the weather. They even seemed stronger than they looked. He also learned they were not simply tall brutes built for fighting. They each possessed a unique skillset, and that made the construction very easy for them. He had watched as all 24 of them got to work every day. They only needed one lecture on the concept, the prototype, of the Behemoth, and then they would get to work in total silence except for a few moments to pass instructions.
He was now standing on the beach of the Frozen Sea in July of his fourth year on the Red Mountain. The sea was indeed frozen, in the winter months, during which the giants could cross the sea into the nothingness farther north to obtain more resources. Now, though, the sea was liquid. The giants were with him, and they were all looking at the work of their hands in the deep water in front of them. K'rar named it the BH-Pioneer, meaning Behemoth Pioneer, and had this name written on both sides of the ship. It was magnificent. Many times larger than the warships that had chased him along the Korazin east coast, and would render those warships, his own warships technically, completely useless. K'rar had also been advised to add a battering ram in the bow of the ship, and he had taken the advice. A mere collision with a wooden ship, even without the battering ram, would cut it in half. This ship was also an entirely new design for a warship, although Xaxanika had no warship to compare it with, having no use for them. They would marvel at a common wooden warship from K'rar's native land, yet he was preparing them for this fearful sight, not to mention 24 giants. The Pioneer was fitted with all manner of new weapons systems. The Nephilim told him about something fantastic from their days as kings. A huge stash of an explosive incendiary on the Xaxanikan islands called the Kaffraria, off its northeastern coast from Cauda. The Nephilim had kept it a state secret, and apparently it still was. In their days, they had used chemar to defend Allon-var from passionate revolutionaries led by Phinehas I. Chemar was a highly explosive substance, causing substantial damage to its close surroundings when dropped with any real force when hot. There was none in the mountain, but the Nephilim encouraged him to fit the ship with systems to fire it. K'rar was already an industrious maverick, and turning the chemar into something useful for him wouldn't be difficult.
K'rar was standing on the beach also with a wolfdog, Targa, which he had picked up as an orphaned puppy of a white mountain wolf, and adopted. So 26 beings were looking at the Pioneer this July, and K'rar knew that it was with this that he would have something to say to the king of Xaxanika. The nearest Nephilim to him was the male leader, the one called Asthenes, named after their first, and last, king. K'rar said to him,
'Now it is time to return to civilization. This ship can sail faster than a normal ship, so you should sail it to the Kaffraria. No one will see you.' The ship had been built not just for humans, but also the Nephilim. All 24 of them could fit on the Pioneer.
'How do we contact you?'
'You don't. I will come to you. We don't know how long it will take you to sail there, but it cannot be more than two weeks.'
'Yes, Your Majesty.'
'Take anything that we might need,' said K'rar, 'now, I have seen you guys run like mad juggernauts. I need someone to take me down to Zohaltiel on his back.'
'Of course.'
The Nephilim had kidnapped him from Zohaltiel and brought him to Nephilia, this base, in just one day. They were fantastic endurance runners, able to maintain a top speed for more than eight hours at a time, so K'rar knew what he was talking about. The fastest of them was the same one who had almost been killed at Zohaltiel, Tahwan, so that task fell to him. They would have to sail upon his return. Before he left, Estoril, the female coleader of the giant family, said they had something for him.
'It is regalia for the King of the Nephilim,' she said, and pulled two items out of the leather pouch by her waist. One of them was a collar, made of clean bearskin with a precious stone in its center. When K'rar put it on his body, it was a perfect fit. The green stone rested where it should, on the center of his thorax. The collar was circular, and his shoulders made up its diameter, separating two semicircles to his front and back evenly. Then Estoril also pulled out a sword.
'Asthenes I held a sword made of froststeel. It is a material from an island in the frozen sea, which was swallowed up by the water. There was enough with us to make this one for you.'
K'rar was especially excited about this. As king he did have his own sword, but he hadn't even escaped his palace with it, and Garrera would be holding it now. Still, this sword was no doubt better than the other. Froststeel, according to Estoril, was three times stronger than regular steel, and would endure the harshest of environments and long usage without wearing. This sword was wide at the hilt, narrowing up to the tip. It had a coppery shine to it, and was much lighter than normal steel. The hilt had an ornamental miniature head of a bull, the emblem of the Nephilim from long ago. K'rar appreciated this because he actually had never owned his own weapon. Even the one home in Korazin wasn't really his until he could wield it, and he had been too young to even lift it. Now K'rar was already eighteen years old. He was grown.
And he was looking forward to many things. He had an itinerary in his head. First, he wanted to meet princess Shaniz. He, too, had grown fond of her. She would be thinking that he was dead, and so would everyone else who had come to know him. Besides, everyone else but him had been returned to their homes. He was especially worried about his foster family, who would have been gutted by the news of his disappearance. These were on his itinerary too. He would begin by sending them a letter.