Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 11. In Which We Ruin a Storm Giant's High

The storm giant lay dreaming across the entire valley. His skin was light blue, and he had a long white fringe of hair trailing from the back of his bald head. A thick mustache of shock white rime had coldly coalesced on his upper lip. He wore a loincloth of fluttering black roc feathers and seaweed sandals. An empty fanny pack made out of a stolen silk hot air balloon fell down between his splayed legs, mercifully obscuring his presumably huge, blue balls.

No one in the party had ever seen a storm giant before, and nobody in a thousand years had seen one this coherent. Physically coherent, that is. Mentally he was quite incoherent, his junkie mumblings rattling rocks free from the nearest cliffs. But most of the time you couldn't even see a storm giant. They were very large, but ethereal, a few brush strokes thicker than cirrus. And they almost never manifested their lower body, or clothes, at least not outside the confines of Cloud Kingdom. It took too much energy, energy that they could be better spent rubbing clouds together to get lightning, which storm giants ate.

However, the more that storm giants were exposed to magic, the more corporeal they appeared. And this one must have gotten his mitts on some primo shit, because he was almost solid. His huge body was actually flattening the grass. To storm giants it was called "getting heavy" and this dude was a motherfucking paperweight. You could see details like the deeper blue blemishes that he had drug addledly scratched into his cheeks and forehead. You could still see into his body, but was it was like looking into a thick fog with scraps of shadows blowing to and fro inside him. These shadows were all the magical items that the giant had imbibed in order to get heavy over the years. Phylacteries, floating carpets, saints' tears, bezoars cut from sacrificial bulls, spirit gems, elven treaties, anything with even a hint of magic in it that could be swept up in a sudden storm and snorted was whipping about inside its body.

The party walked to within fifty yards of the giant and stopped to stare. Lucy, who had taken numerous electives covering substance abuse among the fey, immediately diagnosed the situation.

"He's overdosed on something incredibly powerful," said Lucy. "And his system is still drawing out magical energy from whatever caused him to nod off."

"Can he die?" asked Marbles.

"I've never heard of a storm giant dying like this," said Lucy. "They're such powerful beings that even if they black out, the magic inside them eventually dissipates and they wake up. But whatever's inside this guy is crazy powerful. He may be like this for months. He may eventually condense into an enormous hedge of diamond."

"How do we wake him up?" asked Marbles.

"We might not want to," said Lucy. "You run the risk of him being super angry. It's not like he's just made a mistake. He's an addict. No self respecting storm giant would be brought this low, literally and figuratively. You know what they say about giants and valleys."

"Valleys are alleys," said an elf, perched on a rock to their right. Clad in a moss green jerkin and matching breeches, and standing stock still, the elf had gone unnoticed by the party. His black and lacquered longbow's string was drawn tight, and a black hafted arrow, over two feet long, was nocked at its center, its wickedly ornate tip making a minute figure eight in the air as the elf kept it centered. The elf was aiming it straight at the party.

"I am not aiming my arrow at you, everyone." said the elf. "Do not worry. I am merely waiting for the magic lamp to appear, then when I see its shadow I am going to shoot it out of the giant and put an end this mess."

How to describe this elf? OK well this is your time and I want to respect that, so let's get right to it. This elf looked exactly like the guy who played the coach in Friday Night Lights. The TV series not the movie.