Role

Chapter 1

Falling,
the baby giant wailed, howling as he fell in the way only a newborn can.
His mother ignorant of his coming birthed him into the air as she fought her
last battle with her clan against the nightwalkers sliding through the rift over
the northern plains, high above the Arial City. The swipe of a massive
nightwalker's serrated claw cleaved the giantess from her offspring, and
her in two.
Falling,
the baby hurled through the clouds, his screams frail against the din of
battle above. Premature, his bones too thick and flesh still too thin, he
tumbled through the night sky, his bald head tossed violently in every
direction his limbs flailing like a rag doll's buffetted by the high altitude
winds.
Eyes wide in ignorant terror and clamping shut in involuntary spasms the
newborn convulsed in attempts to gasp for air and shriek in concert.
He fell.

The coin safely in her purse, the whore shoved her drunken trick out the
door into the alley, unsated. Half drunk on elven wine, and half stoned on
dragon's blood, she stumbled backwards to her canopied bed and fell
prone into her silken sheets, tremors taking her as she whispered a cantrips
to find the bliss of sleep.

Cold rain pelted against the whore's face, she pried her eyes open to
stare up at the gaping hole in the fabric of her bed's canopy through the
thick tiles and timbers of the roof and into the drab sky above.
pressed deep into the mattress at her side, its legs broken, bone spouting
through the too thin skin, a cloud giant baby lay at her side. Its shallow
breaths barely audible as he stared into nowhere in anguish, unable to cry.
The whore whispered her cantrips again, and rolled over.

When she woke again, the world was too real, the bloodied broken baby
still lay there barely alive. Her addled mind didn't begin to wonder how he
came to be there, she saw no child, just an opportunity for coin.
The whore wrapped the child in some old rags and rushed after the
noisy dwarven caravan that had woken her from her restless sleep.

"Paid too much., it probably won't survive." Seldain snorted at Maughert.
The blacksmith snorted back dismissively, "Tha whore donnae know gold
frum duergar shite, deserves tha dross she got, an yer daft if ya think
I'd pay fur a broke dead baby. Dafter still if ya think I'll let tha child
perish. Legs probably won't never work, but we'll raise him up an do good ta
have a giants arms ta work tha bellows.