Chapter 2

A/N: I will do my best to try and expand my writing making this chapter longer than the prologue. Thanks for the support, I will hopefully improve my writing as this story progresses and hope that everyone will stick around. I also reread A Farmer's Tale by alltheutold to get some more ideas of what to add to this story. I hope the author has no issues with me using some of the ideas from that fic. Enjoy the chapter!

'The Great Tongue Of Giants'

'The Old Tongue'

"Common Tongue"

I don't really remember much about the darkness, and maybe I should be happy about that. The first moment I was aware after my death was laying swaddled in a soft feeling blanket. I knew it was fur from the time I spent with my paternal grandparents, it was a very distinctive feeling. When I opened my eyes I quickly began to panic, my vision was extremely blurry, but there were huge shapes moving around. The first thought though my head was that my grandma's stories had been true; that these were terrible monsters from times immemorial coming to eat or do other horrendous things to me. I involuntarily started to cry and make non-sensible noises, and this led to those huge shapes making their own guttural monosyllabic noises, only making my crying grow more frantic. I gathered what small amount of wits I had remaining and tried to beg for mercy only for more random sounds to come out. I noticed that my mouth couldn't articulate properly, and when I tried to squirm my limbs held little strength. My panic peaked and my breathing grew rapid as one huge shape began to draw closer, the shape becoming ever clearer as it grew nearer. When it was in range to pick me up I saw it was a large heavy set woman.

The woman was heavy set, with wide shoulders, and forearms the same size as her biceps. She was clearly a female due to the large bulge on her chest, and wider hips than one could expect to see on a man. She wore what seemed to be poorly stitched together furs and pelts, wrapped around her body in whatever way would cover the most skin. As she bent down to pick me up I saw her face, she had a great tangle of dark brown hair on the top of her head that fell down her back and shoulders. Her hair was greasy and full of dirt, as if she hadn't bathed for a very long time. Her forehead was sloping and solid, as if carved from stone rather that the softer skin a human would have. It led into heavy brows, under which lay a dark pair of expressive eyes. They too seemed to be dark stones, as if picked from a river bed and placed into stone carving. The nose was wide and quite flat, and like all other features, was much more stone-like than human skin. The mouth was wide and thick lips were peeled back revealing slightly pointed teeth, not so pointed as a canine or feline, but closer to a monkey's teeth without the large fangs.

She bent down to pick me up with both hands and I resigned myself to being eaten; I only hoped it would be swift and painless. But to my surprise once I was lifted up, I was then cradled in one of her gigantic arms while I could see the other move the furs in front of her chest exposing her breasts. She moved me towards her nipple and I seemed to latch on without conscious thought. I was now close enough to get a good read off her face and eyes, they seemed to hold endless love and patience, like I remembered my grandparents looking at me when I was young. She started to sing in that deep guttural voice of hers, it was short single syllable noises. That brought back flashbacks of my childhood too, singing in my native tongue with my grandparents, laughing when the song was over, and living what I now consider to be the best days of that life.

Once she started singing in that low voice of hers I quickly calmed down recognizing that she meant me no harm. She began to move, still singing that calming melody, and rejoined the group of shapes I saw previously. As we grew closer I noticed my eyesight had grown significantly better than when I had first opened my eyes. I noticed we were inside some kind of structure, it seemed similar to the teepees I had seen in my youth. The air didn't seem cold on my face, but I could see breath fogging the air as the woman breathed. There was a faint smell to the space, made of old fires and unwashed people, and I could hear other voices, just as deep and guttural as the woman breastfeeding me. I could distinguish about six different voices, and when I could see the people making the voices, I could see that they appeared similar to the woman, that strange hard skin, wrapped haphazardly in furs, with similar wide features. The woman stopped her singing and began to talk in that strange monosyllabic language, I finally gathered enough wits to stop suckling, and my arm was loose from the fur wrapping that had entrapped it before. When i looked at it i saw that same stony texture as the others; then it clicked. That woman was my mother, these were my new family, and immediately I decided that I would love and care for them the way I should have loved and cared for my previous family.

My existence as a baby was not a terribly exciting thing, I mostly just played in my swaddle trying to move my limbs with any sense of coordination, being breastfed by my mother, and shitting and pissing myself on accident. I spent what I judged to be about a week with that schedule, never leaving our tent. One day i was picked up and fed, usually after this was completed I would be burped and set down again. Instead of that my mother started walking toward what I had judged to be the door of our home, I was ecstatic to be able to see more than one tent. When we stepped through the fur that covers the door i was first hit by what felt like a frigid wall of air, it was freezing outside! Once i got over the cold feeling of the air outside i tried to turn my neck to drink in all that i could.

The first thing I noticed was that there were about twenty tents spread across the clearing we were in. There were more of the stony skinned people I had realized were my family. They spoke to each other in their single syllable language as they moved about the camp, and I understood that we were moving our village. These people were similar to the nomadic tribes of my ancestors in my previous life, living off the land as they moved wherever the food was. It was a simpler life than my previous one, but I vowed that I would do my best to improve it with my knowledge all the same.

My mother drew closer to another group of women, who I noticed also held bundles in their arms, my fellow babies. They were similar to what I had judged myself to look like, through feeling my face and seeing what I could have of my body, but they were also larger than I was. At first i thought that they were simply older but there was such a difference in size that they should have been toddlers walking if they were older. I was just a smaller baby, which was strange, but i knew that with my mind i would be able to stay ahead of the curve, though evidently not physically.

I was wrapped in furs and secured on my mother's back along with the other babies, and the village was already packed by the time I was secured. It was as we were leaving that I noticed that some were riding on an animal. It was a wooly mammoth! I was left stunned as we began our journey. The rider seemed to sit on it as if a horse, and some pulled sleds with covered packs. Once the astonishment ended I decided that either these mammoths were smaller than those of my history, and I was simply in the paleolithic era of my earth, or we were a great tribe of giants and this might not be the earth i grew up on. While we walked through the giant evergreens, covered in a thick layer of pristine white snow, I observed the others of my tribe. Some held stone tools, which would be expected if this was the stone age, but others that i decided in my mind where more important held axes or spears with bronze blades. They were not simply beat roughly into that shape, i could tell that they had been cast by someone. This simply added to the mystery of my location and time period even more.

We journeyed around wherever we were for many days, stopping at dark to rest in the much lighter tents for the babies such as myself, and huddled around large fires for the older people. I decided that the sound my mother kept making in my direction was my name, Mag Wun Doh. I also began to get a simple grasp of certain words because my mother kept pointing to things and making that sound. My memory seemed to be better than I remember too, I attributed this to a baby's ability to learn rapidly. The days of traveling seemed to blend together as I listened to my mother talk and did my best to learn the language.

This routine continued for what I roughly judged to be 2 years, i noticed rather quickly that my fellow babies didn't learn as quickly as i expected them too. Slowly I realized that all my people seemed to be mentally slower than what I expected them to. I also was able to pick up on some other more complicated tongue that some of the older giants spoke. I was also able to see myself in a stream now. I was similar to all the other stone people, which was what I decided to call my tribe, due the earthen texture of their skin and rough features. The differences that were most clear were the fact that I was quite a bit smaller than my peers, and my eyes were an eerie green. The green was light, like what I remember deciduous tree leaves looking like rather than the dark green of the surrounding evergreens, and there was what seemed to be a slight glow to them. My hair was also a dark red rather than the common browns of the tribe, looking similar to dried blood.

At this age me and my larger peers spent much of our time with the elder giants, I learned about the old gods that we worshiped at strange red leaves and white barked trees. The trees held faces that the elders were carved by 'little squirrel people' as they were named in the Great Tongue. When they spoke of them in the Old Tongue they were known as the Children of The Forest, they were magical beings like us giants, I decided that we were giants when the elders referred to other tribes as little people, they were small and had clawed hands, and were powerful users of sorcery. The old gods were gods of the creeks and stones, of rivers, trees, and mountains, ancient beings born from the world itself.

It was comfortingly close to the stories of previous life, and when I spent time at what they called heart trees, I prayed earnestly because I felt a presence that I could not explain. They also spoke of the wargs and greenseers of the Children of The Forest and 'First Men'. I was enamored by the tales of magic and the elder knew some basic earth shaping himself. It was captivating and strange to watch him close his eyes and make the earth shift slightly. When I asked the elders about learning magic they told me i would have to wait until I was older, I vowed to dive as deep as I could into magic in the future.

The elders also told me of my father, the other male giants in my group were my uncles, apparently he was a 'First Man' who had 'stolen' my mother. I learned that 'stealing' was how the 'First Men' found their mates. That explained why I was smaller than the others, and I also decided that the 'First Man' half of me, along with my reincarnated mind, let me be more clever than the other children. While growing up I also learned of the harsh life we lived on this land, it was hard to adjust at first, but luckily i was a baby and learning came easily. The knowledge I learned with my paternal grandparents in their small cabin in my previous life also helped.

During one of the lessons with the elder, whose we all called Old Man Weg, told us that the signs of winter ending was upon us, the seasons were weird in this world, lasting many years. With the end of winter we would make a journey to a 'First Man' tribe he called the Thenn, and we would be able to trade some of our supplies for food. When we went to leave back to our families I was asked to stay back. He told me, 'Young Mag, when get to Thenn, we leave you with them'

This was like a punch in the gut to me and I swiftly replied, 'Old Man Weg, why I stay at Thenn'

'You father tell mother when stole her, "If son then I take"'

'Why father say that'

'No know'

That was the end of the discussion as Old Man Weg left me stunned. What about my plans to lead my people to improve their lives, to show them things I learned from my grandparents, and at school, what about my mother and the rest of the family. I was quite petulant for the rest of the journey to Thenn, silent and sullen whenever I spoke. Except for my mother, I would never do that to her. Over the course of a week I finally cracked, I couldn't stay like that for very long. We were a joyful people, always laughing as we worked and journeyed. When i asked how old Old Man Weg was by chance, he told me that he was over 300 years old, and I was stunned. I asked how old the oldest giant ever was, and Old Man Weg said the elder who taught him was over 400 years old. This was quite the revelation for me, as I had never expected to live that long, but also it brought me joy because I could cause more changes with my long life.

I took us two weeks to reach the Thenn, we traveled slowly and gathered and hunted as we went. When I first saw the Thenn it was the final confirmation that we were giants, they were small people, to me, and had armor made of bronze and wood and also carried axes, spears, and swords made of bronze. We met with one Thenn who seemed to be the leader, or 'Magnar', as I remember Old Man Weg telling me. He said that the Magnar of the Thenn was their god in the flesh. He gave the tribe leader, whose name I still don't know, some food. This was the guest right, something Old Man Weg said has been practiced as long as anyone can remember. The Thenn spoke the 'Old Tongue' of 'First Men' and not all the giants spoke it, the language was too complicated for most. We stayed with the Thenn for a week before the tribe left, I was told I would wait here for my father.

At two years of age i was quite a bit more developed than the Thenn Children, not to mention much taller and heavyset. Overall, I fit in best with the children who were not quite teens, I judged myself to be about four and a half feet, it is hard to tell with so little reference. I mostly trained and hunted with the rest of the younger Thenn, laying traps in the forest surrounding the settlement. The Thenn had built themselves simple log cabins to live in with a great long house for the Magnar and his family to live and hold feasts in. I tried to suggest things like farming and ranching to the Thenn but I was an outsider and even worse, a child, so none of the suggestions gained any traction. I lived and trained for about six moons before word came to the Magnar that ships were approaching the coast near the village. It was my father I was told, he was the leader of the Skagosi.

When the ships landed men began to get off, they were hairy and wore more furs rather than the wood and bronze armor of the Thenn. Some also wore what I recognized to be wool and even had pieces of chain mail and armor. They spoke a rough version of the old tongue and when speaking with each other seemed to speak in yet another language. I looked at the flags on the ship and most were of a green lobster holding a harpoon, others were of what looked to be a dead tree, and the last were black and red triangles. They unloaded what looked to be salt and fish, and a small amount of grain. I realized that some people in this world knew of farming.

While the apparent leader of these Skagosi was talking to the Magnar, the Magnar suddenly started pointing to me, but I was too far away to hear what was being said. Once the trade appeared to be done the man approached me and said in slightly better "Old Tongue" than some of his men, ' I am your father, Artos Magnar of House Magnar, and you will come back with me to Skagos and be my heir.'