Planet
Torbak
The planet of stone giants: colossi of rock that take one step a day, so slow they are mistaken for hills.
Torbak is a grey rock desert, flat and empty — except that its hills walk. They are stone giants, three hundred metres tall, that have been crossing the planet for ever at the rate of one step a day.
The colossi
A giant of Torbak lifts a leg for six hours and sets it down over six more. The ground shakes at each contact and the sound carries from one horizon to the other. They do not eat, do not sleep and seem to be going nowhere: the Arazians followed one giant for forty years without finding it a destination.
What grows on their backs
Because they move so slowly, the giants carry a landscape on their shoulders: moss, shrubs, pools of rainwater, and nests of birds that have never known any other ground. To kill a giant of Torbak would be to destroy a small forest — that is the official reason the Arazian Empire has forbidden all exploitation of the planet.