The Brotherhood and the Giants

In the 29th Century terrible pandemic wars had ravaged the planet and the brotherhood lived in burrows like goafers.

Giants ruled the virulent upper world completely and once a year they hunted the smaller human brotherhood for food.

The annual killing was a truly horrendous event and the burrowing family groups lived in dread of the yearly winter slaughter.

Most of the brotherhood's burrows were made in old nuclear dumps buried hidden none hundred years earlier in the 20th Century. The brotherhood was created as an order of clerics by the then Governments to warn future civilisations of the lethal dump locations through each new generation. 

In a bitter twist of fate, that same brotherhood became the very inhabitants of those dreadful sites, an irony not lost on the reclusive order.

Over centuries of living in the tainted earth the brotherhood became immune to the sickness brought on by radiation and gradually were at one with the waste.

Not so the giants, who abhorred the vast dumping tips, those irradiated badlands which made them sick and weak.

Yet as foul as the dumps were, they were less terrible than the unbearable weakness of severe starvation. It drove the giants to extremes in those hungry winter months, when thick snow fields covered the land, robbing them of their usual abundant prey grounds.

Only the hot toxic burrowlands of the brotherhood remained snow-free in the harsh post-glacial winters. 

If the giants' hunts went well, the catch would be enormous, great enough to see them through to Spring, when the melts came and they could return to grabbing juicy mammals just waking up, which for the giants, was as easy as picking fruit.

The heat of the burrows had been the secret of the brotherhood's survival. Coming from the cities and not evolved to live underground, the first wave of  survivors came out of the pandemicide relatively intact, only to perish in the ever cooling world of a new ice age. Some attempted to get beneath the glaciers in any old cave or mine, but literally froze to death in their holes.

Some others came through by climbing the nunataks poking through the ice. The ionised ether at the top of world, together with a diet of growth-inducing chasmophytes, enlarged these mountain men to enormous proportions. Up there in the altitudes, only the strongest behemoths triumphed, eating the weaker giants, thereby developing a new-found hunger for living flesh. This hunger never faded and only burgeoned, a blood-lust for raw meat, which could only be satisfied when the ice-sheets melted.

And so it was as the centuries flew, as the glaciers of the second ice age started to wane,  that two distinct forms of what were once Homo Sapiens came to be, the giants from the hills and the burrowing brotherhood. Predator and prey.

The brotherhood enjoyed a seemingly happy life underground, a teeming society based on spiritual beliefs and family ties, living on the harvest provided by nature, the myriad roots of nutritious vegetation hanging down from the rooves of the burrows. It was a varied floral diet, combined with the bounty of insects residing alongside.

Generations had survived this way and the knowledge of the underworld was passed from one to the next.

The knowledge of the giants' kills was also passed down, together with the gradual realisation that they were getting more frequent and lethal with each passing winter. Too many family and friends had died in agony on the ends of the giants' sticks and in their unforgiving stomach baths.

Something had to be done and a call for ideas went out across the burrowlands.

Spears were too small, bows and arrows too weak, explosives impossible to make.

But then a notion arose among the brotherhood, a desperate notion for a dire time.

Since the giants' preferred method of hunting the brotherhood was to poke a long sharp stick in the burrows and impale as many inhabitants as possible before pulling it out.

The idea was simple. Dreadful but simple. The brotherhood knew that the giants couldn't tolerate too much exposure to the toxic air of the burrowlands. Contact with actual atomic waste would kill them outright or at least, render them senseless, permanently. 

Somehow toxic waste had to be got into the giants. The only possible was the brotherhood doing it.

And that meant some of their kind sacrificing themselves by first rolling in waste, then clinging to the giants' sticks whilst ignoring the screams of their skewered brethren and finally leaping into the giants' open mouths as they ate.

It seemed both simple and impossible at the same time, but something had to be done or the brotherhood would not survive much longer. The giants had to be culled.

The first attempts by the suicide leapers ended in failure, as the correct moment to jump is critical to successfully entering the open jaws of the giants. A wrong move lead to abortive flights and meaningless deaths.

Equally some giants roasted their prey over open fires, which meant the whole laden contingent perished as they dropped into a shower of flames. Fortunately most giants are the brotherhood raw. 

Jumpers learnt by observing all the heroic mistakes and eventually the perfect angle for trajectory was discovered, so ensuring a clear dive passed their doomed kin and deep into the stinking throats of the enemy and down into the eager stomachs. 

As the giants came in their hundreds to feed so too the leapers leapt and the lethal cargo was delivered en masse. The countless heroes were mourned and revered in equal measure and each agonised giant that fell was raucously celebrated.

And so it was, after many years of this suicidal but ultimately victorious defence, that giants thought better of impaling in the burrowlands and an equilibrium ensued between the two entities.

The brotherhood's future was thus secured and the giants faired as well eating other animal meats.