Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:

" You Only Think They Have One Head "

Submitted by Eventua

You only think they have one head.

When I was a child, we were only ever told stories about giants - not stories about space, or other worlds, or even of ordinary people in the world they say existed before the giants came from the north and the south. Just, giants, and how no matter what happened or happens or will happen, the giants are to blame for everything.

But that’s because you only see them from the ground.

A giant, it’s said, is huge. Unfathomably, impossibly huge - so huge that it no longer scares you, because you could follow it everywhere, or it could kneel down and look straight at you... and it wouldn’t even know you were there.

Even people who have seen it from a distance, they always say the same thing: “It’s only got one head.”

I’ve seen them, of course. Not all of one at once, but I’ve seen enough pieces, just rarely enough. Glimpses are just fragments, but you can still make a picture out of fragments. Their bodies slope and fold, like misshapen snowflakes vaguely in the shape of a person, their proportions twisted and unnatural.

But it’s not true. Don’t ever believe their lies, born of ignorance or fear or a misguided urge to protect you.

I don’t know how they move - how could I, or anyone else? It’s like asking how a mountain would move. It simply *is*, so far beyond your tiny, pitiful existence you can’t take it in. But I do know this - they’re fast. Some people say they move so slowly you can’t tell, that they lumber and lope like a sluggish, overgrown child. Except they’re not moving, in that case - they’re feeding. On what? How could I know? No one’s ever built a city underneath a giant’s kitchen. Just in the sewers and in the corners of basements.

I’ve seen it, from the top of a mountain, as it shifted through the wind storm.

Every aspect is terrible, every movement. Even when they aren’t doing anything at all, you can feel it in your soul. The knowledge, the peering, the wandering eyes... always hungry, always lurking, always knowing. The weight on your mind can’t be described, because the feeling isn’t fear, or despair, or anger. It’s something else, like a gnawing confidence - confidence that you will die, in the cold, oh so cold. All you don’t know is: which cold will it be? The cold of the Earth, or the cold of the giants?

I could just make it out, as it fed on the city below, so tiny and small, like an ant-hill - four million dead and dying and soon to die.

I know some whisper that the Earth was warmer, once. That the wretched, human hating Earth didn’t freeze you to the bone, that there were creatures you could eat. Eat, as in their meat, not their souls. Such tasteless, tasteless souls, no better than trying to eat the air. And they say we knew how the world worked. But science and technology, promises and progress... what good did they do us when the giants came? No, better to forget such things, and not despair at our ancestors and the mistakes they made.

For just a fraction of a second - a tiny, confident, thousandth of a second - it looked at me, with a billion empty eye sockets made of frozen glass. And they screamed upon the wind. Every single one of them.