First Appearance

'Something rose from the dunes...angled like a toppled tree or marble column...it was blunted, crooked...Fifty men, hands linked, could not encircle the base. The bend occurred seven or eight man-lengths up, at about three-fifths of the total length. The stone looked both creased and polished, dark grey under the colorless light of the moon...revealed the stone to be green...'Jade...That's not a coloumn...It's a finger' (DG, UK MMPB, p.273-5)

'The details of that carved jade finger...Swells and folds of skin, the whorls of the pad...' (DG, UK MMPB, p.275)

Heborics Visions of the Jade Giants

A new object, growing in his vision as it drifted nearer. A glimmer of murky green, stiff-limbed, yet strangely contorted, torso twisted as if caught in the act of turning. Naked, spinning end over end, starlight

playing across its jade surface like beads of rain.

And behind it, another, this one broken – a leg and an arm snapped clean off yet accompanying the rest in its silent, almost peaceful sailing through the void.

Then another.

The first giant cartwheeled past Heboric, and he felt he could simply extend a hand to brush its supple surface as it passed, but he knew it was in truth far too distant for that. Its face came into view. Too perfect

for human, the eyes open, an expression too ambiguous to read, thought  Heboric thought he detected resignation within it.

There were scores now, all emerging from what seemed a single point in the inky depths. Each one displaying a unique posture; some so battered as to be little more than a host of fragments and shards, othersentirely unmarred. Sailing out of the blackness. An army.

Yet unarmed. Naked, seemingly sexless. There was a perfection to them – their proportions, their flawless surfaces – that suggested to the ex-priest that the giants could never have been alive. They were constructs, statues in truth, though no two were alike in posture or expression. (HoC)

A vast – impossibly vast – red-limned wound cut across the blackness, suppurating flames along its ragged edges. Grey storms of chaos spiralled out in lancing tendrils.

And the giants descended into its maw. One after another. To vanish. Revelation filled his mind.

Thus, the Crippled God was brought down to our world. Through this . . . this terrible puncture. And these giants . . . follow. Like an army behind its commander.

Or an army in pursuit.