While Empires threatened to clash over his broken body in the South, the Giant's legacy was fighting to survive in the damp, freezing marshes of East Anglia, England.
Runa stood in the mud, wearing pitch black. She was twenty-seven, hollow-cheeked, and hardened into pure iron. She believed her father had been beheaded by King Olaf.
Emperor Cnut had given her 150 refugees a tract of worthless, flooded swampland. Cnut's logic was cold and pragmatic: "If they die, I lose nothing. If they use the Giant's science to survive, I tax them."
Runa refused to die.
She opened the Kitab al-Amlaq (The English Book). She forced Torik and Leif to dig French Drains. For three months, the grieving, traumatized refugees dug trenches in the freezing mud, filling them with rocks to divert the swamp water into the sea.
They did not cry. Runa did not allow it.
"My Father did not trade his life to Olaf so we could drown in an English swamp!" Runa's voice cut through the rain like a steel blade, addressing the exhausted orphans. "He taught us the math! He taught us the water! We do not cry for the Giant; we build his monument!"
By the first spring, the swamp was dry. While the neighboring English Lords struggled to grow wheat in depleted soil, Runa planted nitrogen-fixing clover, then barley. Her crop yield was double that of the English Earls.
When the local English Barons complained to Cnut and demanded Runa be heavily taxed or burned as a witch for "unnatural farming," Runa did not cower.
She marched into Emperor Cnut's throne room in Winchester. She slammed the Royal Charter her father had negotiated years ago onto the Emperor's table. Using compound land valuation and legal loopholes, she humiliated the English Barons in front of their own King.
Cnut laughed, a booming, terrifying sound, and upheld her tax exemption.
As Runa walked out of the throne room, she touched the cover of the English Book. She was keeping the machine running. Because if she stopped, she would have to remember that her Giant was dead. And if she remembered that, her heart would finally stop beating.