The Twentieth Reign of our Empress.

  Month Nine of the Lunar Cycle.

  To My Wife and Husband, and any of my Surviving Children.

  To you who find this letter, I may not know you but you need to live.

  To spread the word. I implore you, do not let our mistakes die in vain.

  Please. I beg you. Read until the end that you will know of our fate and it will not become your own.

  The Giant was a traveller to the continent. At first, we had it trapped and at our mercy, it had been mercifully unconscious and our brave soldiers and generals had pinned it to the ground with a thousand ropes and wooden pegs.

  At first it roared in anger before it took on a gentle approach. I saw the look in its eyes. This was a rational thinking being, only scaled to a size that dwarfed our fortress walls and made our naval boats appear as mere bath toys.

  It wore clothes as a person does but the language it spoke was incomprehensible at first until we were able to identity and learn its language. The style of the clothing was strange to say the least but at least it was dressed as a creature of reason and purpose.

  It showed us a knife the size of a castle wall, a device it called a pocket watch which ticked and moved and the clothes that it wore were enormous. They would have been enough to outfit entire armies if we could have used the fabric.

  The original plan from the Empress was to make the giant submit to our will, to fight our wars against the countries that opposed our will. Such a being armoured and protected under our guidance would have taken over the entire continent within a matter of weeks at most.

  I blame the alchemists for their failure to understand the precise dosage of the drugs that we gave the giant and the severe effects that swiftly followed. The Empress had them all killed but by the time the giant returned to us it had changed, a hairy monster, crazed in its eyes and lost all sense of reason.

  I write these final notes as a reminded of the folly of trying to control the will of a living god. I wish we had used poison that would have killed the creature in its sleep. The demands of meat, bread, vegetables, and water were sufficient to feed an entire town for a month in the time it took for a single one of its meals.

  The people would starve in the time that a single year would have passed, it was why the Empress had become so desperate. In one way she thought far ahead of the rest of us. The surrounding kingdoms would have fallen and their food stocks become sufficient sacrifices for the towering giant.

  She never confided in me exactly why she chose to try and control the giant rather than ask through polite discourse. It never harmed a single citizen of the Empire nor did it choose to cause damage or chaos when we were able to talk its language.

  From what I was told by the interpreters all the giant wished was to return home, back to its place of origin to a much-missed family. Our culture, our way of life was anathema to the being that towered above our buildings. The food that it ate, the wine that it drank we later found were full of a product that it despised and caused a severe moral infliction within its mind.

  I surmised that it was this that was the true beginning of our end as a nation. I only have a vague theory though, none of us had ever visited the true homeland of the giant. When it had learned enough of our language to converse with those scholars who were able to decipher the strange tones and words that the creature made we learned of its disdain for the word that it would use to describe our culture.

  Cannibalism. A word that meant a species that fed upon itself. The Empress who once fed on the blood and flesh of her own kin when she had taken the throne and ordered their deaths.

  Our blessed and preserved dead who we fed honey until it became as their blood and changed the texture of flesh and skin into a sweet delicacy only reserved for the nobility and of course the giant.

  He had asked for sweet things of taste as he claimed to have a desire for a specific drug called sugar. The item was mixed with cakes and pastries and then added into drinks for direct consumption. Our Empire, our land was blessed with an abundance of natural resources but we lacked this element of sugar.

  No. To be sure, it was none of the above that truly broke the mind and will of the giant and brought about our demise. The death knolls of an entire Empire that had spanned generations upon generations and which our beloved Empress was to be the last ruler.

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  I could have cursed the giant with my last breaths, but no. I blame the advisor who advised our true ruler to try and control through the use of magic and chemicals. She thought that she had learnt ancient secrets and words of power which would bring us into a new golden era and the Empress, cursed be her name, listened to the sweet talking and flirtation.

  She invited into the Court a demon in human guise, though we knew little at the time as we ourselves fawned and fought each other for meagre scraps of power we listened and knew that the consumption of others who were human was our sacred duty. No, our culture and very fabric of high society depended on it.

  There were none of us who had not been to the surgeon to cure our illness and be prescribed bone broth and specially treated meats. We did not hide our beliefs but instead embraced the madness of the one who thought to treat the gentle behemoth who had washed up on our shores.

  Blood and flesh, sweetmeats and organs would have tasted to the giant, once treated and cooked as any other flesh surely would. None of us were permitted to take him to the warehouses where we drained the blood from criminals and those to be sacrificed upon pain of our own execution and that of our household.

  No. The advisor spoke of a method, a new type of science that would use the original sources of our culture. Those animals which became carnivorous and fed on each other and the plants which transformed them and which became sacred to us.

  The giant was forbidden from seeing the places where we used our blood and that donated freely by the people to nurture the plans. But it was still the fault of the man who called himself a scientist, a new type of scholar who developed the plan and the method.

  Instead, through the use of a newly developed type of drug the Empress made the decision that would kill us all. Although a giant it came to us in the familiar shape of a man, dressed and open to reason. After the medication had taken effect and its mind and shattered and its body warped it became a living devil.

  Hair and teeth grew, muscle and strength filled its limbs as it became a hideous imitation of the creatures which fed on the sacred plants. I once saw bovines who ingested it transform, their teeth bared they would separate into groups and those stronger than the others would rip and chew on the flesh of their own kind.

  We had been forbidden from using it upon ourselves. Human bone and flesh and blood could be eaten under rule of ceremony or time of desperation when our crops failed but we were never allowed to partake directly of the sacred plant.

  Even our brave soldiers who fought against the opposing countries were forbidden from eating it. Even if they would kill ten others for their own life, they would become as wild beasts and turn on their own comrades with sharpened teeth and nails and jaws that would widen.

  I had seen a few of the nobility who failed to listen to the warnings of our founder, due to their position in our society they were trapped deep underneath the ground within prisons guarded by mute guards who had had been adopted by the kingdom.

  The screams and howls for their hunger for flesh sickened me and I would become one of the few who petitioned the Empress through secret ballot to have their executed. To have the fate befall the giant who was found upon the shores of our once mighty Empire created our own end. A living god of true destruction whose hair-covered hand smashed through the walls of our cities in order to satiate his never-ending hunger for flesh.

  Our crops stomped on and our cattle and blood pools drained to the last drop. The creature grew hairy as a wild beast and became enraged, gorging itself on the resources on your country. Our lakes and waters defiled and mountains of sheer excrement devastated the landscape. The stink attracted flies and bugs which could almost shade out the sun.

  A destruction upon my kingdom and the death knolls of an entire country. The giant chose to consume the flesh of my people, of my children and their kin. The husbands and wives, the bakers, and the dancers. All were mere mortal flesh to be consumed in its never-ending hunger.

  As I write these words, we are rallying the last of the soldiers to try and kill the creature in one last effort. They will draw our blood as we prepare ourselves for a final plan.

  The few survivors who were still sane from the kingdoms around us have joined our plan. As we have been unable to pierce the skin of the creature, we have a new plan. Our soldiers and their horses were shattered and broken; our weapons ineffectual in the face of the enormous demon that came from a once gentle giant.

  All of us will take poison and offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to be consumed by the giant. This time the poison should work and even though we as a people will cease to be we are confident that it will kill the creature that we created.

  May the Empress remain in the hell that she created when she chose to turn a gentle giant into a ravaging beast.

  We will all die in the stomach and grinding teeth on her creation and curse her name. I go now to deliver myself to the waiting jaws of the demon that we created.

  Do not forget the sacrifice of our people. Our nation.

  Forgive me.

  Yours faithfully,

  Grand Chamberlain

  Limze

  Bless you for reading and thank you. Please survive to pass on this sacred knowledge. Do not eat the tainted meat. Do not eat the flesh of the giant abomination.