Sophia’s finger had already strayed to the island of Calla (she had heard this story a hundred times) and come to rest on a castle rising from the top of a green hill. “Hello, giant!” she said. “I see you!” For the artist had cleverly drawn the hill so that if you looked at it the right way you could see it as a hill-giant curled up on the ground sleeping.

“Ssh, you’ll wake it up!”

“That’s not what it says in the book!”

“All right. After King Brindle gave his life for the Quest, Paralonda Bufrect was the rightful queen of Calla. But she had no desire to rule and so she passed the crown to Prince Anvellyne.”

“His friends called him Lyne,” Sophia informed him gravely.

“And King Anvellyne ruled wisely over Calla with Mardellian as his closest friend, adviser, and  . . .”

“Magician!”

“Mard the One-Handed became a wizard, yes. Together they saw to it that  . . .”

Sophia’s finger had already strayed north to a cottage surrounded by livestock. A white-haired woman was shown carrying a bushel of wheat on her hip. “Edda!”

“. . . that Edda the Giantess was made to feel welcome whenever she chose to stay alone in her cottage. But she loved to wander back and forth between there and  . . .”

Sophia’s finger made a huge swipe eastward across Bits and Shivers and Bewilderment to a golden glen in the mountains not far from a towering black fortress.

“Yes,” said Dodge, “the glen where she loved to spend time with her mother and her grandmother.”

A wild look came into Sophia’s eyes and she looked up into Dodge’s face. “How tall is a giantess, Uncle Dodge?” she asked, as if she did not ask the same question every single day.

“As tall as she wants to be,” said Dodge.

Map of The Land

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Eric Fahlman and Casey Little of Fahlman Olson & Little, PLLC are gratefully acknowledged for their patient and cheerful efforts to bring me up to speed on all matters related to wills, health care directives, per stirpes, and the bureaucracy of death in general.

Anyone who has read David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality will notice that Fall owes an intellectual debt to it. Anyone who hasn’t, but who found Fall interesting, is urged to do so.

Another source of ideas was a series of conversations over the years with Steve A. Wiggins, author most recently of Holy Horror: the Bible and Fear in Movies and of the blog Sects and Violence in the Ancient World. His area of specialization is the ancient city of Ugarit, which to make a long story short was an interesting place from a religious standpoint, sitting in the Venn diagram intersection of what we think of as Semitic and what we think of as Greek ideas about god(s), and in an interesting transitional phase between poly- and monotheism.