I

The boy in green’s heavy panting, his swift steps and the dry leaves he kicked up seemed as if it was only an ant’s chattering as he was chased down a mountain by massive gray feet the moment his eyes opened. It’s sole wrapped loosely with pelt and leather uncut and untreated. It’s skin tough that it wouldn’t be punctured by the trees straight as spears, rumored to be as strong as stone and iron.

This wasn’t a place the boy in green had laid his still young eyes upon. A land covered in boulders, trees weaving in between. Soil dry and stoney that nothing should be able to be grown in. Moss crept closer and around the boy’s boots trying to hold him down, ripped to pieces as he took his next step yet still persisting, but valiantly avoiding the giant’s feet.

Each step the giant made shook the ground so much that it left the boy airborne for a fraction of a second. The club in its hand came crashing down, obliterating a boulder. He held his head down as a piece came smashing into his face.

The boy in green ran past the trees, bracing for the next shake caused by the giant’s step that never came. The boy, though knowing that he should’ve kept on running, turned his head back to look. The air filled with a deep grunt, both of the giant’s feet were in the air, barely connecting to the ground with three toes, knees bent, head way lower than it ever should be. The giant had tripped on a branch.

The boy was knocked to his back, coming eye-leveled with the monster. Rambling muttered out of his mouth, what would have been a glass shattering scream in his mind. Two beady, bloodshot eyes the size of his fist. A balding head with red and graying rough beard tied and knotted with the same kind of moss that was climbing up the boy's leg.

His arms and legs softly pushed against the ground, trying to himself to anywhere that would be safer than in front of a raging giant, but looked more like a joyful child playing in the mud. His eyes wouldn’t blink, tears fell down his cheeks. Whether it was to moist his dry eyes, or from this dreadful scene before him was impossible to differentiate.

It took the giant standing back up for the boy in green to finally regain what little strength his limbs had left to push himself off the ground, and filled his lungs enough to call what he let out a wail.

A now truly enraged giant charged in, snapping the trees as it passed through with the swings of his club. It raised its arm up, the leaves on the ground flew as he sucked in a breath of air letting out its first cry. The boy's legs gave out accepting what was waiting for him.

However, a second cry came instead, this one of pain instead of rage. The boy in green was rained upon. But unlike rain, it was heavy like iron, instead of being light as feathers. Unlike rain it was boiling, instead of cooling. Unlike rain, it was maddening, instead of calming. It ran down half of the boy’s face, his vision blurred with red.

A man wielding a blade like a shard of the night sky cut off the giant’s arm. Long blonde hair all the way down to his thighs stained pink with blood, his cape drenched red with gore.

The man turned to the boy in green, though trembling, he had enough composure left to thank and ask for the man’s name after giving his own. The man’s face was colder than the harsh winter from his homeland. He opened his mouth and uttered, “I am…”

A gust of wind blew through, carrying the boy’s tears, their hair dancing on the path it flew through. A wind that was silent but carried the weight of a thousand words. The boy in green turned his gaze from the one in front of him, bent down with a hand covering mouth to stop himself from gagging up, but what remained of his last meal left his stomach and leaked through the gaps in his fingers.

He was no man, but the living god that commanded blood and the battlefield.

A satchel of water landed by the boy in green with a thud. “Drink up.” He looked up to see the blood god with a monotone voice. The taste of steel and rust coated the boy's mouth, his face shriveled up like dry plum. “It helps to stable your stomach,” the blood god answered a question not yet asked, “you’ll need that with me beside you.”

He knelt around beside the boy in green, and asked, “You don’t belong here. What are you doing here?”

The boy sat up, wiping off the tonic running down the corner of his mouth still stinging, “A girl, with a floating eye. She magiced me here.”

For only just a moment of silence, it felt as if it was dragged into an eternity from the damned grace of Winter. The stench not of terrible body odor blown into the boy in green’s face, dulled by the elixir given to him by the menacing figure.

“What color was the eye?”

“It, it was red.” The boy answered.

“Heh!..” The god cracked, slipped out between his teeth that he was holding so tightly onto. “Consider yourself lucky that the Saori you saw wasn’t green. You would’ve been dead. Every bone crushed, your meat minced. Be glad that even if that was the case your infant sister would be too young to understand what happened.” He stood up, kicking bushes to clean his boots.

The boy’s face not much more horrified than he already was. “From now on, cast your name aside, you will be referred to as Paeleus.”

The boy accepted before acknowledging the odd request. “But I already had a name—

“It will be when referred by me.” The god exclaimed, with a face not of dismissal, and curiously filled with empathy. “Come now, I’ll lead you home wherever that may be.”