The Cursed Twins of The Stalagmite King

What grinding anger gripped Brutus as he cleaved the Stone of Udrr? Anger felt by a wanderer who has voyaged through the bitter night of the North and braved its terrible seas? Anger felt by a wonderer who stood amazed on the deck of his gigantic boat, heaving in the foam, looking up at the fiery path carved out of the firmament by the seed of Helda that screamed in the heavens. Anger felt by one who saw it vanish with a hiss beneath the churning waves and who leapt powerfully in after it, searching in the frigid darkness for hours, wrestling with leviathans for possession of the wonderful Stone and who finally emerged, dripping, with the glowing lump between his arms? Or perhaps anger at his own impotence to use that power when he got the Stone back to the Kingdom of Giants.

Of course he was proclaimed King, of course he was lauded for following the counsel of his blind sister who foresaw the coming of the seed. He made her his queen. He was proud to sit on the Stalagmite Throne at Udrr and rule unquestioned and unchallenged. But the Stone he had brought with him just sat there. He had heard promise of its great power, of the magic it would endow, of the greatness he would achieve. But it even ceased to glow.

He asked his sister why the Stone did not live up to its promise. She answered him truthfully, for she was truthful but not wise, and she told him it awaited another. Another more powerful? More great than himself? Perhaps it was the adultery of her tongue that gripped Brutus as he cleaved the Stone of Udrr, the Stone he had seized from the depths, the Stone that cursed him and his kin for his fit of rage.

Brutus raped his sister that night and ran out into a tempest borne of the damage he had wrought. Even as she lay there, clutching her stomach and bleeding, the Stone spoke through her its dark prophecy. Her sons would be twins but they would be conceived of one egg, split in two. They would each have only half the limbs of a complete being, but twice the hunger, half the intellect but twice the fervid rage. Such was the conception of Gurgustius and Gorboduc.

The blind giantess died in childbirth, and the cursed twins were born in a pool of blood. When he returned, calmed and embittered from his tempestuous self-exile, Brutus found these hideous creatures and their dead mother and was revulsed. He took them to the deepest lake and drowned them, left them for dead when they ceased their writhing. Far from dead, the twins crawled into the nearest cavern and recovered. They returned to the Giant King who was paralysed with anger at the sight. He flung them from a great cliff, but again they returned. He finally cast them into the fire of Mount Helcolond, but again they were saved by the power of the Stone. Disgusted but defeated, Brutus accepted the deformed things as his sons and generals.

Brutus, aged and decrepit, has ruled fitfully and tyrannically for many centuries since the birth of the twins. But for three hundred years he has not moved from the Stalagmite Throne. The last and awfulmost part of the curse is a terrible lethargy which has encrusted his eyes and limbs and now there are tendrils of stone connecting his head to the roof and his feet to the floor. In name he is still the King of the Giants, the Stalagmite King, but there is a long and terrible civil war being wreaked by his sons, each brooding and scheming to overtake and extend the Giant Kingdom.