The frenzied beat of war drums echoed across the battlefield.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom...
The Orks' drumming gradually slowed, forceful and rhythmic. With each resounding beat, giants, trolls, and ogres emerged one after another from their ranks.
The giants, an ancient race that had once ruled the continent, advanced toward the human army at the Orks' direction, their heavy footsteps uneven, wooden clubs several meters long clutched in their hands.
Aaron dropped the head of Luthic's Claw and stared at the distant giants, recalling their history.
In ancient times, after the three great Sarrukh empires had begun to decline but before the dragons rose to prominence, there had been a period in the Realms known as the Age of Giants. Back in that era, so remote it was almost forgotten, these towering figures that reached into the clouds-the book's exact wording, though it also stated that giants stood roughly five to eight meters tall, depending on their kind-had been active in every corner of the world. They had ruled most of the Realms as a world-spanning dominant race. Their civilization had been as vast and unstoppable as the sea of phlogiston beyond the crystal sphere.
Yet every civilization had its glory and its decline. The dragons and giants of the Realms had both been rising powers that succeeded the five founding races. Over time, increasingly fierce clashes between them had finally escalated into a continent-wide war. Led by an avatar of the dragon god Garyx, the dragons had fought the giant kingdom in what history called the Thousand-Year War. That millennium of warfare had ended in complete victory for the dragons, leaving the once-mighty giant kingdom with only scattered territories in the continent's far corners.
Worse still, Annam, the giants' father god, had been deeply disappointed in their performance.