Chadwick Rye

The firelight barely reached the vaulted ceiling of Thromgar’s cave, though the massive hearth consumed entire tree trunks like kindling. Outside, the autumn storm lashed the mountainside with fury that humans would call catastrophic but that felt to Thromgar like the gentle percussion of rainfall against his stone sanctuary. He hunched forward—still eight feet tall even seated—and ran a weathered finger along the delicate pages of his journal, each one specially bound by the master bookcrafter in the valley town below.

The day’s prompt awaited his reflection: *The best compliment you’ve received.*

Laughter rumbled deep in his chest, a sound like distant avalanches that had once sent human armies fleeing in terror before a single stone was thrown. Compliments. Such fragile things, rarely offered to his kind.

His quill—fashioned from a thunderbird’s primary feather—seemed impossibly delicate between his fingers as he began to write, the specially formulated ink flowing across parchment that could accommodate his oversized script:

—

The humans who dwell in the sheltered valleys below my mountain have many misconceptions about giant-kind. They believe we measure worth solely through feats of strength, that our emotions are as crude as boulders, that we care only for treasure and territory. They do not understand that after seven centuries of life, one develops sensitivities beyond the merely physical.

Yet I remember with perfect clarity the words spoken to me by a human child exactly seventy-three years, four months, and sixteen days ago.

I had ventured closer to their settlement than was my custom, drawn by curiosity about their harvest festival. Their bonfires were mere candle flames from my vantage point, their music thin and reedy across the distance, but something in their collective joy called to me. Concealed by ancient oaks, I watched their rituals with the curious detachment that comes from being forever apart.

Until the child found me.

She was perhaps six or seven winters old by human reckoning, her hair a wild tangle of copper curls, her face smudged with berry juice and hearth ash. How she separated from the celebration, how she wandered so far into the darkened forest, how she found the precise cluster of trees behind which I crouched—these remain mysteries that sometimes wake me in the midnight hours.

I felt her presence before I saw her—that peculiar awareness of being observed by another conscious being. When I turned my head, she stood there, a lantern clutched in tiny hands, her eyes wide but unafraid as they traveled the impossible distance from my moss-covered boots to my wind-carved face.

I waited for the scream, for the terror that inevitably comes when humans behold us in our true scale. I had heard such sounds before, had seen brave warriors reduced to trembling supplicants by the mere fact of my existence.

Instead, she said seven words that have outlasted empires in my memory:

“Your eyes look like stars remembering home.”

Not my size. Not my strength. Not the ancient scar that cleaves my face from crown to jaw, souvenir of the Dragon Wars when I was barely two centuries old. She saw my eyes—what I later realized she could only have glimpsed as twin points of reflected lantern light in the darkness—and found in them something kindred.

I have been called mighty by chieftains seeking alliance. I have been named terrible by bards singing cautionary tales. I have been declared majestic by wizards hoping to curry favor. But never, in seven centuries of existence, had any being—giant, human, dwarf, or elf—looked upon me and seen something cosmic, something that belonged elsewhere, something connected to heavens and origins.

“Do they miss it?” she asked, when my stunned silence stretched between us. “The stars, I mean. Do they miss being home?”

What could I say to such a question? I, who had outlived my entire clan, who wandered these mountains as the last of my bloodline? I, who remembered the night skies before human cities cast their competing light upward? I, who had indeed often gazed at stars and felt an inexplicable kinship?

“Sometimes,” I answered, my voice lowered to a whisper that still rustled the leaves above her head. “Sometimes they do.”

She nodded with the solemn wisdom unique to children, who accept impossibilities without requiring explanations. Then she reached into her pocket and withdrew a small object that she placed upon a nearby stone—a carved wooden star, painted with intricate patterns in blue and silver.

“For when they get too lonely,” she said, and then she was gone, a flash of copper hair vanishing between ancient trunks as calls from the searching village echoed through the forest.

I have kept that carved star for seventy-three years. It sits on the shelf beside my sleeping furs, alongside treasures that would ransom kingdoms—the scale of an elder dragon, a crown surrendered by a conquered nation, a blade forged in the heart of a dying sun. Yet it is the star that my gaze finds when I wake each dawn.

*Your eyes look like stars remembering home.*

From any other being, such words might have seemed mere childish fancy. But there was something in her perception, something that recognized an essential truth that even I had not fully acknowledged. In a world where my kind are seen as monsters or marvels, as threats or resources, she saw the loneliness of displaced light.

It was not just a compliment. It was recognition.

—

Thromgar set down his quill and glanced toward the shelf where the wooden star still rested, its paint long faded but its shape preserved through decades of gentle care. Outside, the storm was passing, revealing patches of night sky where actual stars now pierced the darkness.

He wondered sometimes what became of the copper-haired child. She would be an elder now by human reckoning, if she still lived at all. Would she remember her midnight encounter with a mountain giant? Or had it transformed in her memory to mere dream or childhood fancy?

It mattered little. Her words had altered something fundamental in his perception of himself. They had granted him something giants rarely received from other races: the gift of being seen not merely as a physical force but as a being with an inner landscape as vast as the night sky.

Thromgar closed his journal and rose to his full height, his head nearly brushing the cave ceiling. Dawn would arrive soon, bringing with it the endless tasks of survival. But for now, in these quiet hours between storm and sunrise, he would step outside and look upward, allowing his star-remembering eyes to find their kin in the endless dark.

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