The earliest day of Mahmud's life passed in a blur. Althos was whisked through the titan's first twenty-four hours of life with all of the speed of a galloping war-horse hot on the trail of a fleeing enemy general.

In what felt like mere minutes, Althos experienced the first time Mahmud ate, drank, and vicariously experienced other, less agreeable mortal needs. And the deity found himself grateful that as a godly being he would never have to experience such weakness and such ugliness.

I've been grateful that I am not a mortal before... but what I experienced today, in the last few minutes, has been some of the most repugnant experiences of my life. He thought, rather snobbishly. His immaterial nose was upturned at the thought of being near a mortal infant.

But the god also felt a pang of pity for those of them who found themselves alone and without the aid of a family during those most vulnerable years, as at multiple points during Mahmud's first day, Althos wondered if the baby would have survived alone. Probably not... He realized, a bit somberly. But he never failed to push those feelings aside and focus on picking up every detail he could from these memories.

At the end of the young titan's first day of life, the titan was bundled up in a warm blanket and pulled into his mother's arms. The woman who gave birth to the titan softly kissed her son's forehead, and the titan was almost instantly unconscious. The young thing fell asleep quite easily, nodding off the moment the baby closed his eyes.

And for the first time, the deity experienced unconsciousness. Vicariously sure, but it was still an odd and unsettling experience for the god to endure.

One moment he was awake and the world was filled with color, life, sound, and more. And the next... he' wasn't. And it wasn't. How eerie. Althos thought, his eyes opening to the terror of sleeping for the first time. And what's more, was that the titan didn't dream the first time he fell asleep.

There were no imaginary scenes to fill the void, to spare the child from the terror of a particular sort of all-consuming and uncaring darkness. Mahmud didn't dream, because the titan had no real memories yet. And so to Althos, the titan's few hours of sleep served as an alien portal to terrifying, absolute darkness.

And then, as if he were just blinking the titan opened his eyes, conscious once again. But the titan woke up somewhere else, in a masterfully crafted and jewel-covered cradle. And so Althos' world was filled with the same bright colors, the same jarring sounds, and even more or less the same variety of sensations that the corpse he was sitting next to would experience during his first day of life.

Days passed in a blur. Althos quickly learned that since babies didn't and couldn't do much, adults oversaw their development, took care of their needs, and protected them. This made their days fairly routine. Or at least that was the case if they were royalty.

Althos quickly learned to identify the titan's mother, a female desert giant, by her voice and the sound her particular shoes made before, enabling himself to be prepared whenever she grabbed young Mahmud and pulled him into a motherly embrace, which she did quite regularly. He noticed that he learned to recognize the telltale signs of her approach a lot quicker than Mahmud did, as Althos was able to hear the infant's nonsensical thoughts while in the titan's memories.

The deity listened to the babbling baby's thoughts and observed that memorizing his mother's voice and a few other giveaways as to her imminent approach would take the young titan a few days. This mattered because the woman who gave birth to Mahmud was not the only female in his presence during these first days of life.

A number of different wet-nurses tended to the future sultan's needs. A number of the wet-nurses, marriageable and veil-covered young desert giant women, rushed in and out of what Althos slowly pieced together was a private nursery on an hourly basis.

The giantess and her cadre of servants watched over Mahmud, watching with eager eyes as the titan began to grow. This wasn't something that was immediately apparent, but it didn't take long for young Mahmud to begin to walk. A mere two months actually. And it was when he was able to walk that Althos first realized just how tall the infant was, even in his infancy.

The first time Mahmud stood up, Althos realized that the titan was easily as tall as Raverangos. And the titan wasn't even two months old. The titan wasn't aware that he was tall for his age, though he was, and didn't realize that walking at two months old was unheard of among the isolated desert giant tribe he was born into.

Those were things the duo would learn, in a few weeks' time, but neither he nor, much later, Althos knew that when Mahmud first managed to balance himself long enough to take an unsteady first step.

Mahmud would meet his father for the first time the day after the titan distinguished himself by walking at two months old. Althos learned this before Mahmud would because Althos had learned to speak the language of the desert giants from when Mahmud shouted in his brain. The god heard the titan's mother, a woman named Adalet, proudly declared that Mahmud's sultan father was en route to meet his son. She was bragging to one of the wet-nurses who saw to Mahmud's well-being, a woman whose eyes burned with jealousy.

A few hours passed before the sultan arrogantly strode into the nursery, accompanied by an honor guard of two desert giants wearing thick cloaks and who had tight grips on imposing glaives. The sultan was also accompanied by Adalet, whose eyes gleamed with newfound pride and the familiar love Mahmud had grown accustomed to from his mother.

At that moment Mahmud felt something unfamiliar sneak into his boyish heart: nervousness. The sultan, a gigantic figure who towered above Mahmud had cold eyes, and he was a stranger. Mahmud was eventually coaxed into demonstrating his ambulatory prowess to the sultan, after some gentle encouragement by his mother.

After taking a few careful steps, Mahmud stopped in place. He had nearly fallen! But he carefully regained his balance and then he confidently kept walking.

After this when Mahmud next turned to look the regal stranger, there was a grin on his regal face. A smirk. And there was also pride glimmering in his eyes, a pride similar to the prideful look his mother sometimes gave the wet-nurses while talking about things too complex for an infant to understand.

The sultan would discuss something with Adalet, something that Althos immediately understood as being about getting the young titan a tutor, but Mahmud was too busy celebrating what he somehow knew was a success, to try and listen to the words his parents were speaking. The baby babbled, making noises as a sign of excitement, and cooed its self-pride.

This tuckered the tike out. And for the first time ever, the young titan fell asleep without his mother lulling him to sleep by holding him close. And the next time the boy awoke, he would begin his education. At just around two months old.

The next twenty-five years of Mahmud's life were of incredible interest to Althos, and in the god's mind went by too fast. The young titan, who himself was an example of a forgotten mutant offshoot of giants, had astounding intelligence and demonstrated a remarkable growth rate, both physically and emotionally.

These next, formative years, were the years in which Mahmud began his education, as well as got to visit the thriving city he was born in.

Althos gained an advanced education in Mahmud's memories because the titan was swiftly taken to a number of skilled tutors. These tutors speedily taught the titan, and unbeknownst to them, a god, a variety of skills.

They would teach the giant, and the god who was helping himself to their lessons, the education a ruler needed. Althos learned and mastered desert-giant etiquette, he learned of the agriculture of the giants, of the animal-husbandry, of forging and of survival out in the wastes outside of the city and a few other, nearby cities.

He learned of local politics and intrigue, something which he liked more than Mahmud did, and even saw a handful of familiar faces. Some of the wet-nurses graduated from attending to Mahmud and Adalet and become wives and mothers themselves, or spell-casters and priestesses who served their people in other, more directly useful ways.

Both also learned of the future sultan's father's status as the strongest general in the city, a status which brought with it an honorific: sultan. And Mahmud learned firsthand that some of his family members, particularly a few of his uncles on his mother's side and his aunts on his father's side, were strict individuals who harbored suspicions that Mahmud was a bastard child, as a way to explain his size, growth, and even his intelligence.

Their cold stares and even colder shoulders propelled the titan to exceed any expectation placed on him. It was his disdain for their behavior and their distaste for him that drove him to master both offensive magic and the blade. Those were two of the things he'd be known for later in his life.

He'd also become known for his mastery over battlefield tactics. The titan would grow up to be a revolutionary leader in battlefield discipline, but that was a ways away from the days of his youth. The day he'd learn to love stealth tactics was coming, but it was much farther down the road.

Both the titan and the deity were prodigious learners, absolutely voracious students who whole-heartedly threw themselves into whatever lessons the network of tutors planned for the young titan with few exceptions.

Althos took advantage of this chance to learn freely, studying the principals of basic mathematics, particularly the universal applications of arithmetic, while Mahmud excelled in the practical applications of mystical geometry. Mahmud mastered the art of literary analysis, and Althos memorized the pragmatic explanations for the traditions and principals of the unique, highly religious society of the desert giants.

An area where Althos and Mahmud would demonstrate the same passion, millennia apart, were the magical arts. Althos and Mahmud both learned of evocation magic, specifically desert magic that specialized equally in blinding enemies, and in separating groups of enemies in fierce sandstorms. Though Althos couldn't practice the magic in the memories, he did memorize the magic and he swore to himself to practice and master it the moment he exited his own mind.

Another area where they shared equal zeal was in learning about folkloric tales that were regularly talked about in taverns in the thriving capital city that laid hidden in the depths of the devilish desert. Though Althos paid close attention to the tutors who told Mahmud of the religious traditions of the civilization, Mahmud himself wasn't the pious sort. But when he and a disguised guard visited local taverns and interacted with regular desert giants, Mahmud zealously listened to the stories they told.

One instance of Mahmud visiting the regular people that would have a lasting impact on his life and on the area of the hellish desert where the civilization of the desert giants was based, happened when the boy was 23, still a baby compared to many of the city's inhabitants, whose years were counted in the hundreds.

The night it happened the boy found himself inside of a tavern, a hood covering his face as well as keeping sand out of it, so as to ensure that no astute observer readily identified him and ratted him out to some of his less pleasant family members. The tavern itself was pleasant enough, a wide place littered with pots that contained sticks of incense, burning so as to fill the area with a pleasant aroma and help keep customers awake.

He listened silently as a meddah, or a storyteller sat down in the heart of the establishment and began to entertain the tavern's regulars. The speaker, an ancient giant and a tavern regular who regularly claimed to have once traveled throughout the desert warmly greeted the crowd and began to tell jokes. The giant was dressed in a neat, mildly formal outfit for his story that night, and as such his upper body aside from his face was covered.

Mahmud sullenly drank while the entertainer did this, as the titan did not have a temperament conducive to humor-oriented speakers. The liquor was less than remarkable, but it was also less than expensive so the titan felt he was paying an adequate amount for an adequate drink. The storyteller focused on humor for several minutes before he eventually announced that he was coming to them, the lucky people in this particular tavern, with a new, "true" story.

Mahmud was no fool, and he knew that this particular meddah had a reputation for tall tales and elaborate ruses, but the titan had a surprising soft spot for supposedly "true" stories, as he enjoyed poking holes in them whenever he could as a means to test his critical thinking skills. So he turned to the center of the tavern, where the meddah sat with a single soft-light focused on the elderly's giants olive complexion and he waited for the meddah to speak.

"Friends... lend me your ears." The storyteller began, making himself small and speaking quietly so as to encourage people to approach him. Many of the drunkards in the tavern did, only barely avoiding disaster. Mahmud smiled at their surprising displays of dexterity.

"I'm going to tell you all a tale tonight. A tale that may frighten you. A true tale! One that happened to me." The storyteller warned, cautioning his audience and preparing them for whatever terrors were to come. The audience groaned when they heard him say that, but he waited for them to quiet down before responding to the wave of groans he had just heard.

"It's okay for you to disbelieve. But you see I am willing to swear an oath! An oath on Golaxiria's beloved axe." The speaker said, putting an emphasis on the name of the goddess the desert giants paid homage too, even countless generations after she vanished.

I know this is a continuation of an ancient tradition but... it's so boring. Mahmud thought, his sentiment matching Althos' own sentiment at that moment. But then the meddah began his tale in earnest.

"Allow me to set the mood." The storyteller said, his eyes glinting with pride in his stagecraft and storytelling skills.

"Many years ago, I once traveled the desert. You see I was part of a band of warriors, we were practically an army in our right. We roamed the wastes, fulfilling contracts and serving under a variety of generals. We protected our people, your parents and grandparents from the monstrous nightmares that roamed the sandy fields." He said, his eyes filling with images of distant sand dunes, and of his comrades, lost to the horrors that roamed the wastes or to the ravages of time.

The tavern was uncharacteristically silent as he said that, everyone gazing respectfully at the giant. There was a seriousness to his words that usually escaped him suggesting that he was thinking about what he had said, and perhaps even what he had lost.

"We faced it all!" He suddenly declared, boldly and arrogantly bragging while catching the crowd off guard. This time the crowd laughed. The old man had regained his usual levity.

"We hunted down scorpions. Girtablilu. Jackaloids. Harpies. Minotaurs. Devils. But somethings... well somethings you never forget." He said, shaking his head as he thought about the story he was about to tell.

"The first night I ever encountered a sandman was a good night. Until I met it of course. But I don't want to get ahead of myself." He said as if trying to pace himself and not eat something that might spoil his appetite.

At this point, the giant felt that he needed to incorporate some audience participation. So instead of continuing his story, he pointed to a tavern-regular who happened to be seated alone and was listening to the story.

"You! Tell me about the sort of woman you prefer." The giant demanded, crass humor liking up his eyes. The crowd of tavern regulars all turned to look at the fellow who had been singled out. A profound silence fell upon the crowd as they waited to hear the lone giant respond.

The fellow had been drinking the same cheap, but subpar liquor as Mahmud. Though it appeared to have had a much stronger effect on the normal giant drinking it than it had on the titan drinking it, as when the giant spoke his words were slurred and spoken with the same aggressive confidence that cheap liquor gave even cheaper men.

"I like... women that let me touch em. Women with... breasts out to here!" He said, and then he exaggeratedly gestured to his chest, and then he pointed to the table he sat at as if to indicate that his tastes were for women with severe back pain. The audience's reaction to that remark was mixed. Men in the tavern applauded his drunken honesty, and women in the tavern sneered and hissed at him. But that all suited the storyteller just fine.

"Well my friend... I can't quite recall if her breasts were that big, but the night I had my first encounter with a sandman, I met this lovely lass. She was a tall thing, which is the way I like my women." The giant said and then winked suggestively at one of the female giants nearby, arrogance emanating off of the storyteller as if he thought maybe he'd bring someone home with him that night.

"After she and I... traded battle strategies in her home, I was on my way back to my own encampment. Where all of my friends were." The storyteller said, continuing his story.

"It was when I was between her home, part of a small settlement of scouts out in the eastern wastes, that I first saw the things." He said, his voice again regaining that eerie soberness.

"I had just climbed a dune, one of the few that lay between my camp and the scouting village. And when I looked down to plot out my descent, I saw them. A small pack of things. Creatures I had never seen before." He said, his voice still retaining that seriousness that to the regulars clearly marked the elder's rare moments of wisdom and truthtelling.

"At the bottom of the dune, there was a whole pack of tiny... humanoid-shaped figures made of animated grains of sand, innumerable grains of sand. And they had these... beasts made of sand too." The giant said, hate in his voice. He spoke with unusual clarify, intense focus, and sharp words.

This got Mahmud's attention. Creatures made of sand... He thought. Ones with hands? He wondered, morbid curiosity infusing his thoughts and turning them towards the combat applications of such creatures.

"These creatures were moving seas of sand, wholly focused on studying what I now suspect were our tracks, a distraction that thankfully kept them ignorant of my location. They led their sand-mutts to the places our troops had strode over while crossing the desert. They didn't look at me. But I looked at them." He said, speaking not to the audience now, but to himself. There was a certain frenzy, a bizarre malice in his voice.

"The things never noticed me. But I noticed them. I stood there. I watched them. I watched the way they studied the sand. I watched them make spears of sand and pull them out of the desert with sandy hands, hands that fused with the spears they armed themselves with. Like the world's fastest fucking blacksmiths. I watched one of them spin its spear, did it expertly too. Like the thing was aiming it." He said.

"I think their plan was to follow whatever it was that had their attention. But you see I didn't stick around to see where they went. No. I crossed to the other side of the dune, and began to sneak in the direction of my camp. When I had walked whole kilometers away from where I was, I climbed the dune again, and I sprinted to my camp." He said, some levity beginning to return to his voice.

"I made it to my camp. And when I got there... I screamed. I screamed like a banshee. I screamed loud and long. That sure as shit got the attention of my fellow soldiers. I'll tell you that right away." The giant said, grinning all the while. That broke the tense mood that had overtaken the tavern. The laughter that broke out because of that was genuine, it was heartfelt, and it was a relief.

"I told my commanders and we all left. We packed up our gear, tore our tents, and in the hour we were gone. I guarded the rear, staying behind with a handful of soldiers, and as we were leaving... I could have sworn I saw something, a few piles of sand that were just too big. Just too close. But I suppose because I screamed like a banshee we'll never know now, will we?" He said, grinning at the crowd. They laughed even harder at that, enjoying the idea of a member of their species abasing himself like that. It was unthinkable to them, an act that made them subservient to someone else.

Minutes later, the giant would be leaving the tavern and entering the city at night, a time when people stayed in their homes and didn't look outside, which gave the giant and the figure who waited to talk to him a chance to speak, alone.

As he left, a sullen figure approached him. A creature in a strange hood. This creature spoke softly and carefully, and he had a single question to ask the storyteller.

"The story you told in there... is it true?" The mysterious figure's voice was soft and neutral. It betrayed no emotion, suggested that the speaker was young, and gave away the speaker as male. The giant considered looking under the hood the titan wore, but after thinking about it for a second, the speaker opted for honesty.

"No." The giant said. He reached a single hand towards a long-sleeve that covered his other arm. He dramatically tore it away at the shoulder and as he did so he spoke again.

"I didn't run away from the creatures." He said, his voice surging with righteous anger. The arm underneath the protective and deceptive long sleeve the giant just tore away was made of sand. Mahmud gasped in shock when he saw the limb, as it was attached, at the shoulder, to an otherwise perfectly fine, fleshly upper body.

"During the fighting, I got stabbed by one of their spears. Turns out it could do this." The giant warned the titan, gesturing to his sandy appendage.

Neither of them knew it at the time, but this was one of the events that set the groundwork for Mahmud's life of leadership and his once iron-clad control over his people, a control that the titan would achieve only through the service of the strange, sandy minions he'd eventually acquire.