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          The great Nephilim beheld the trespassers from afar. Lacking eyes of electric-bound metal, they used vast and immeasurable senses to survey the situation in their stead. Drones met a silent answer in the form of deep rumbling and searching clicks, voices from afar calling out and forcing replies.
            Against it all they had survived. When the beasts they preyed on dwindled, they alone outlasted their kind by way of a particularly worm-rich stretch of coastline. When there were a few decades or so of truly awful cold that wiped out what few relatives were left, they sought refuge within the hot springs nestled deep in their territory. When floods from melting glaciers overwhelmed the lowlands, they took to the nearby mountains and gorged on animals who had opted to do the same. They had survived.
            “They” was a somewhat inbred relict population of about three hundred individuals or so. It had not really grown since they took refuge in the food-rich, spring-littered peninsula they called home. Nephilim, of course, bred slowly, and though there was food there was not much, especially by the standards of their immense, active bodies and overdeveloped brains. Only now, with the rebirth of the sun, and the growing numbers of megaherbivores to hunt and raise, only now did they begin to flourish.
            It was nonetheless slow growth, and the natural balance the ecosystems had once enjoyed was long gone. With fresh supplies of algae, the herbivores flourished, as did the Atrox Sapients who ate them. But the big predators, the truly great hunters who kept them in check, had been decimated, and unlike the other beasts they were not well adapted to rapidly refill what had been lost. It would take decades more for the Nephilim population to reach a few thousand in number, and by then there would be so many Atrox Sapients there might as well not be any Nephilim. That is because, by way of their immense power and sufficient numbers, the Nephilim had long been protected against the threat Atrox Sapients posed against so many others. They had nearly wiped out the Drumjaww and the great land wyrms, and it was not beyond reason that, upon discovery, they would do the same to the Nephilim. What had once been a relationship of mutual tolerance (and occasional opportunistic predation) was now ignorance on one side and a shifty, nervous distrust on the other.
            Despite a bit of degeneracy (the limited gene pool was beyond their control), the Nephilim were still incredibly smart. Hardship had not erased their capacity for intellectual prowess, and with the gradual betterment of their world they found themselves with more food and more time for their most prized of pursuits: art.
            Nephilim were far too strong for want of strength, far too advanced and civil amongst themselves to fight for ethics, far too resilient for want of warmth. They liked light but navigated fine without it. They liked buildings but purely for visual appeal, by way of their thick layers of skin and fat they had no need to shelter from warming temperatures. Theirs, historically, had been lives lived at relative leisure, roaming and hunting and engaging in hobbies when there was not a need to procure food or care for young.
            Of course, the ice ages had ended that, and even now, with the bitter deep cold over, they were pushed to action. The Atrox Sapients had gotten far out of hand, and the invaders were rather disturbing themselves, but in the former there was presently a threat while the latter presented an opportunity. They had watched man and how he treated their fellow thinkers. The Atrox Sapients, by way of their general proclivity to shortsighted aggression and childlike simplicity, had given humanity innumerable reasons to wipe them out or at least drive the invading hordes off. But they did not. The Nephilim reasoned it was spurred by morals, for anything with intellect like theirs or the Atrox Sapients had them, and in social creatures they were generally quite similar. The hypothesized idea was that man, in general, valued the existence of other living things and reasoned that fellow sapients should enjoy similar rights to themselves. After all, it was not their world. They were guests and obligated to act polite, poisoning everything with waste and addictive trinkets all the while.
            This was all conducted from many miles off. The Nephilim did not technically even see the human settlements or the biowaste plants or any of it, but by way of their extraordinary senses they might as well have. The smell of waste was as clear to them as sight, and conversations could be picked out from beyond sight or hearing of the conversants. The Nephilim, refined by a hellish upbringing in their dark nursery, were endowed with senses rivalling those of even the foreign machinery they observed.
            Nephilim were used to killing other living things for food and excelled in coordinating the hunt. Though they possessed immense strength, they knew and accepted their limits and found ways to compensate and catch their quarry nonetheless. They could overcome the mammoth and the Jotun, and they could overcome mankind.
            They recognized that their traditional strength was weak in comparison. A Nephilim could easily rip a human in half, even one of the hypersexualized, animesque security automations patrolling the streets or accompanying politicians, who in that day and age were one and the same as businessmen. But a Nephilim could not endure the many and terrible weapons that could be used against their kind. They could not club this foe to death like any ordinary beast. But even hunting beasts was rarely so simple as just swinging a club.
            Like with any vast, unknown wilderness, there is the urge to explore. The newcomers, equipped with heavy duty drones and hovercraft, soon began to explore the vast, surrealistic wilderness that the Nephilim calls home. What followed was the urge to feel the volcanic soil on their feet, breath in the clean, warming air, hike alongside the melting glaciers and gawk at the pods of fifty-ton Jotun.
            Here the landlords were waiting. They had been listening to conversations from afar and had, over the past years, begun attempting communication. They were slow and peaceful, gentle in their movements, which was easy as Nephilim were fast only in their heads. This gentle giant façade was easily appealing. Humans took a liking to them. They learned fast.
            Just as they had mastered the body language of animals and the clicking, pheromone-ridden dialect of Atrox Sapients in the past, they learned human. They could not speak it, as they lacked proper lips and tongues. Instead they possessed a long, prehensile proboscis and a hollow, bony, tubelike extension of their nostrils. Their voices were flutes and trumpets, permeated by internal clicks and rumbles. They understood what man said and taught him to understand what they said. It was an extensive and exhausting process, as the speech patterns of Nephilim were lengthy semblances of song, nearly unbroken, and a slight change in pitch could shift the meaning entirely. Humans spoke fast and spaced between their words. They focused more on solid definitions and less so ideas and emotions, which the Nephilim dialogue tended towards. An entire book could be written detailing how they broke the language barrier, but what matters here is simply that it was done.
            By way of conversation alone, the Nephilim had elevated themselves to the level of proper people in the eyes of the trespassers. The greatest hurdle of the plan had been overcome. They now focused on trade.
            Nephilim had little use for most human things (besides paint and various other artistic supplies, as well as blankets, which they enjoyed for comfort). Trade instead was a means to power. With it they could integrate themselves into the society of humankind and thus clear a path to roles ever higher up on the political ladder. They themselves knew already of trade and politics, but it was primarily limited to managing prey stocks and relationships between different families. An actual cohesive group of Nephilim was generally close in relation biologically (or a group of adolescents newly independent of their parents), but they were in communication of any number of their kind at one time, speaking with friends hundreds of miles off. This long-rage social life was easily facilitated by their wide, open habitats: flat plains that allowed sound to travel without obstruction.
            This had always been so, but they grew much more closely knit upon the arrival of humanity. It was not long before the Nephilim, easily united in their relatively small number, had established their own authorities, individual positions, and political hierarchy. Each had a role in the plan. Even the babies, who often had an appeal with tourists and contributed significantly simply by being cute. The great minds, long smothered by cold and darkness, were at last free to explode into the intellectual operations they so hungrily desired.
            They knew the invaders, often destructive as they were, would not harm peaceful natives, and they would not take their homes or livelihoods. Though they were obviously exploiting the planet, there were some laws or moral precedents that conveniently gave the Nephilim a crack in the door to squeeze their way through and into power.
            The hot springs and accompanying geysers were a popular destination. As such, their massive proprietors begun charging tourists to bathe there. Young mammoths and rhinos (much cuter and chubbier than their elders) were taken from the herds so tourists could take pictures with them and feed them buckets of algae. A similar procedure was done with particularly fat Quattors, Drumjaww calves, and the bleached skeletons of immense marine wyrms. They arranged themselves as tour guides and stewards of the wilderness, which had suddenly gained value far beyond living space and food.
            Native artifacts were in high demand owing to their exotic nature and the human love of souvenirs and trinkets. After all, who wouldn’t want to own something made by an alien? Nephilim sold carved bones and smaller (as so a human could hold them) versions of their immense weaponry. Musical instruments, carved stones, clay sculptures, capes made from alien hide, all was sold for prices far exceeding their worth. From the funds they would commission special vehicles (which was much easier than walking everywhere) as well as the numerous electronics that facilitated access to the internet and social media. Also television, for what they deemed “research purposes”.
            Captured megafauna was transported in the new vehicles and sold for attractions at zoos (only natives were, by laws not even of their making, allowed to capture native wildlife). These fetched exorbitant prices and drew more attention to the endemic fauna and the Nephilim themselves.
            Nephilim art, taken in with the rest of the money laundering that was high-end art, fetched extraordinary prices. These artists, as all Nephilim were, found themselves making many connections with the elite by way of their work. The ideology behind it disturbed them, but like everything else they had done it was suffered willingly to achieve the end result.
            It was small, and they were distant from the newcomers, but the gap was closing rapidly, and it was that they had established relations with them that put them on edge, far above the Atrox Sapients, who generally lacked the intellect or willpower to even try. By virtue of human advances in ethics and civil rights the Nephilim were protected in a way that seemed unlikely given human nature and their technological superiority. It was by that goodness that allowed them to slowly integrate themselves into society and secure themselves in a world of potential rivals that would otherwise decimate them. There were few Nephilim left, but by their wits and cunning they would make themselves strong again.
            They began amassing money and power. Social media was revolutionary in this. It seemed people were quite fascinated with the alien giants and their bizarre antics. They enjoyed watching them, and it humanized them even further. They would, for added appeal, take on the trends and topics humans liked, at least the ones they could tolerate. The electric world became a powerful weapon. With it the Nephilim could raise awareness to the supposed plight of their world: the mass-dumpings of biowaste, the half-starved Atrox Sapients picking through trash, the pollution of the algae marshes and tidal flats. A brief video of a desperate baby Nephilim, positioned rather cinematically atop a floating heap of plastic refuse in the middle of a polluted waterway and rescued by a couple of do-gooders who would then clean it off and speak of the plight their kind faced, that alone was far stronger than any missile or armored vehicle.
            It brought forth the notion that human influence was ruining the alien world, that the noble savages suffered immeasurably beneath civilization’s shadow and had no say in the policies regarding it. This was a bloodless war, with each victorious battle being a clip of, say, a group of Nephilim offering aid to desperate tribes of Atrox Sapients, cute offspring in tow. They presented themselves as peaceful caretakers of their world, noble benevolences who wanted to better the lives of those suffering around them. This was obviously appealing. People would feel guilty. They had caused the suffering of not just violent, savage animals but fellow people. For in that day and age, despite the widespread corruption and cruelty seen in civilization, people could for the most part recognize something with comparable mental capacity as a person. They had grown to love the Nephilim and cared for their plight.
            Unsurprisingly, then, the Nephilim managed to weasel their ways into politics. They had lots of money, seeing as they did not need to pay for electricity or running water or rent. Compared to drab bureaucrats and mildly charismatic (at best) businessmen, a bizarre and exotic alien chieftain fighting for the survival of its people was far more appealing. The notion that it was their world, after all, bubbled back to the surface, and, after all, shouldn’t they have a say in it? People flocked to the idea of governing Nephilim, Nephilim in business, Nephilim as celebrities. One in the same in that world. An ornately-clothed, ten foot alien giant carrying an immense staff made for a highly appealing leader, especially with their sonorous, majestic voices and the intellectual appeal of their words. Nephilim avoided the puzzling word salads of human politicians, which appealed to those who actually bothered to listen to speeches. To everyone else, the description above easily surpassed a corrupt old man.
            A century or so after human arrival, the Nephilim had essentially taken over the politics and business of their world, punctuated by a few closely-allied humans, and a genetically engineered, uplifted Triceratops. They were agreeable leaders, even if there was a bit of lingering xenophobia. Things were managed well.
            Nephilim differed from humans in many ways. One of the more subtle, but perhaps the most defining, was the difference in their thinking. The human mind was infested with an urge to conquer, to dominate. Like dragons, many humans horded power and wealth purely for the sake of it. There were obsessions with status and wealth. A human wanted to be above others for the pure sake of power. A Nephilim was only motivated to power to protect their interests. They did not care for wealth or possessions unless they needed them. As the human was made weak, it was insecure and sought to shelter itself with wealth and titles. The Nephilim, born with its immense strength and resilience, did not care. They did not mind rain or their preferred nudity (they wore clothes for the sake of appearances) or their general lack of shelter.
            In the first place, they had only planned and succeeding in their plan because they wanted security. A few hundred of them against millions of humans and Atrox Sapients. They found themselves a vulnerable minority and sought to put themselves in a place where their interests would be protected. They needed the safety to repopulate and create their art. Of course, they were used to strength, and fearing little else. Introspective as they were, the Nephilim did not deny this, and they took pains to make sure they were fair. The trespassers, despite the intrusion and their filth, were not evil and certainly did nothing warranting cruelty. Neither did the Atrox Sapients, and given their understanding of the Atrox tongue the Nephilim far exceeded humanity in managing them.
            They harbored no hatred towards Atrox Sapients and usually liked them. However, Atrox Sapients were as a group unreasonable and nearly impossible to organize. The Nephilim took pains to be fair towards them and ensure them a place in society. The average Atrox Sapient found itself as a laborer of sorts, replacing machines in many places, raising meat animals for the Nephilim’s carnivorous palates, and cleaning up waste. The more composed served as security guards and operated public vehicles. If they were capable, they were given the same access to more prolific roles as humans and Nephilim were. As most Atrox Sapients only desired food, comfort, and time to roughhouse, they were fine with this.
            It was good. Nephilim were not for luxury and served their roles as needed so as to allow the world around them to function properly. They did not care for profit outside of its necessity in the supply of essentials, they did not care for politics outside of its use in maintaining their power. All was a means to an end. Nephilim in their strength wanted little in the way of wealth or status. They merely wanted to stay comfortable and safe so that they could make their art. Given their name, one could assume they did, to some degree, possess divine natures. That of course was wrong, but many Nephilim did not consider their work art and instead simply preferred calling it creation. In a sense, then, they were perhaps trying to rival God. They wanted to make it not splatters on a canvas or shaped clay but real, ever hungry for a medium more powerful, more tangible. Drawing became writing and song and that grew into film. Nephilim film was different than human film. It was rarely coherent, being a menagerie of intellectual musings, half-baked philosophy, and splattered colors and musical echoes. One moment might depict a worm gorging on refuse and the next be a hallucinogenic river of embryonic fluid oozing down the screen. Nephilim did not care so much for plots as beauty and ideas.
            Genetic engineering was a powerful thing. It had been used for progressively more elaborate reasons over the centuries. What was once fatter, faster-growing chickens and sweeter fruit became supposedly ethically grown biomass that tasted like fine meat and lacked any consciousness so as to warrant protests of cruelty. Animals were taken and developed into monstrous caricatures of televised antagonist beasts: dragons and dinosaurs and Saturday morning kaiju that fought each other to the death in arenas. Like anything that made a lot of money, concerns over animal cruelty went unheeded, concerns over exploiting cloned human beings for monster parts were buried beneath paperwork, and the occasional mauling was silenced with money. The escape of a particularly erratic asset that caused millions of dollars in damage and released a potent pathogen was troublesome at best but did not thwart the business.
            Nephilim were far less corrupt. They banned the practice and found other ways to make money off of giant monsters. At least one or two particularly wealthy ones adopted assets as pets. As for genetic engineering in general, they incorporated it into their art extensively.
            It was not long, relative to it all, that one could behold any number of non-Euclidean, tottering abominations morphing and shifting through the streets, flanked by floating globules of inflated biomass and parades of innumerable beings that could more exactly be described as living things. Pianos walked the streets with tubas and drums. They did not look to be their namesakes but they spoke with the same voices. Walls were alive with sheets of glimmering biofilm and liquid protein. Colossi rumbling outside urban limits devoured waste and reduced it to compost, causing the wild ecosystems to bloom.
            Nephilim-made architecture was monolithic and artistically utilitarian. Buildings were stone and metal in composition and took up pyramids, spheres, and pillars in shape. The cities began to look as if they were drawn by Zdzislaw Beksinski. Cultured growths of pillar trees, resembling nightmarish stacks of femurs and clubs, rose up and crawled alongside walls while skin-like sheet algae covered roofs. This was intentional: the Nephilim grew things and formed things to work alongside the city. The music beasts and their compatriots by pre-formed nature only walked certain paths, never reproducing beyond desirability and never leaving the limits of civilization. The wild places stayed wild as the sun renewed life. Awakened by light, the festering plains of algae and stretches of creaking pillar trees filled themselves with ever-greater numbers of native fauna.
            The human presence gradually lessened. The Nephilim were by no means oppressive, and their creations lacked any form of menace. But it was becoming their world, reflecting their eyes, their ears, their tastes. Their population had exploded, and the Atrox Sapients outnumbered man and Nephilim combined. The natives were making the new buildings and the new entertainment. They had worked themselves into the system and were no longer just running it. They were remaking it. It became them.
            Eventually humanity and its allies would only do necessary business with that world. It produced various foods and metals and a good share of abstract art as well as animals for zoos. By then, interest in the native fauna had subsided. For as abstract and terrifying as the planet’s beasts were, what mad beings their sapient minds could dream up were exponentially more unknowable. In due time the former shining colonies had become a series of monstrous corpse cities: oozing, creaking labyrinths patrolled by any number of eldritch things and permeated with music that expressed emotions foreign to human minds. Waterways cut between massive communal housing resembling blocks of stone, navigated by stocks of swimming creations as well as citizens merrymaking on their equivalents of boats and pool toys.
            A red sky and black moon looked down upon the vast and unmovable pillars, surrounding by stinking grey plains spreading out into the horizon. The howls and groans of unholy beings echoed across the humid air, and within the dank sanctitude of their monoliths the Nephilim and Atrox Sapients worked away at making more. They of course had long since taken to the stars, mostly to engage in trade (biomass cultivated from terrestrial algae was a major export, being something along the lines of that time’s equivalent of flour or rice). But unlike many other races, they did not spread. The focus was on maintaining their home planet. Rather than power, they wanted utopia, and though the Nephilim were smart enough to know that it was unattainable, they nonetheless worked towards the next best thing and achieved it.
            What had been dubbed, among many names, “The Physical Hell”, was their heaven. They had food aplenty. They were safe from the cold. Human interference had blessed them with technology that their world could never have produced otherwise. Now they were left alone, their planet just productive enough to ensure a good quality of life, but not so much that it would be a prime target for conquest. In the event that it was, they were well-armed, and much of the living art doubled as weapons of immeasurable power. Guarded by their very own angels, surrounded by their very own Garden of Eden, the Nephilim had come back from the brink and attained what could be described as the state of gods. They had fashioned the world in their image. A dark infant realm of hellish monstrosities and rumbling, screaming air. It spoke an evil nature and resembled Hell, but they and their Atrox Sapient companions had another name for it:
            Paradise.

Description

          The great Nephilim beheld the trespassers from afar. Lacking eyes of electric-bound metal, they used vast and immeasurable senses to survey the situation in their stead. Drones met a silent answer in the form of deep rumbling and searching clicks, voices from afar calling out and forcing replies.
            Against it all they had survived. When the beasts they preyed on dwindled, they alone outlasted their kind by way of a particularly worm-rich stretch of coastline. When there were a few decades or so of truly awful cold that wiped out what few relatives were left, they sought refuge within the hot springs nestled deep in their territory. When floods from melting glaciers overwhelmed the lowlands, they took to the nearby mountains and gorged on animals who had opted to do the same. They had survived.
            “They” was a somewhat inbred relict population of about three hundred individuals or so. It had not really grown since they took refuge in the food-rich, spring-littered peninsula they called home. Nephilim, of course, bred slowly, and though there was food there was not much, especially by the standards of their immense, active bodies and overdeveloped brains. Only now, with the rebirth of the sun, and the growing numbers of megaherbivores to hunt and raise, only now did they begin to flourish.
            It was nonetheless slow growth, and the natural balance the ecosystems had once enjoyed was long gone. With fresh supplies of algae, the herbivores flourished, as did the Atrox Sapients who ate them. But the big predators, the truly great hunters who kept them in check, had been decimated, and unlike the other beasts they were not well adapted to rapidly refill what had been lost. It would take decades more for the Nephilim population to reach a few thousand in number, and by then there would be so many Atrox Sapients there might as well not be any Nephilim. That is because, by way of their immense power and sufficient numbers, the Nephilim had long been protected against the threat Atrox Sapients posed against so many others. They had nearly wiped out the Drumjaww and the great land wyrms, and it was not beyond reason that, upon discovery, they would do the same to the Nephilim. What had once been a relationship of mutual tolerance (and occasional opportunistic predation) was now ignorance on one side and a shifty, nervous distrust on the other.
            Despite a bit of degeneracy (the limited gene pool was beyond their control), the Nephilim were still incredibly smart. Hardship had not erased their capacity for intellectual prowess, and with the gradual betterment of their world they found themselves with more food and more time for their most prized of pursuits: art.
            Nephilim were far too strong for want of strength, far too advanced and civil amongst themselves to fight for ethics, far too resilient for want of warmth. They liked light but navigated fine without it. They liked buildings but purely for visual appeal, by way of their thick layers of skin and fat they had no need to shelter from warming temperatures. Theirs, historically, had been lives lived at relative leisure, roaming and hunting and engaging in hobbies when there was not a need to procure food or care for young.
            Of course, the ice ages had ended that, and even now, with the bitter deep cold over, they were pushed to action. The Atrox Sapients had gotten far out of hand, and the invaders were rather disturbing themselves, but in the former there was presently a threat while the latter presented an opportunity. They had watched man and how he treated their fellow thinkers. The Atrox Sapients, by way of their general proclivity to shortsighted aggression and childlike simplicity, had given humanity innumerable reasons to wipe them out or at least drive the invading hordes off. But they did not. The Nephilim reasoned it was spurred by morals, for anything with intellect like theirs or the Atrox Sapients had them, and in social creatures they were generally quite similar. The hypothesized idea was that man, in general, valued the existence of other living things and reasoned that fellow sapients should enjoy similar rights to themselves. After all, it was not their world. They were guests and obligated to act polite, poisoning everything with waste and addictive trinkets all the while.
            This was all conducted from many miles off. The Nephilim did not technically even see the human settlements or the biowaste plants or any of it, but by way of their extraordinary senses they might as well have. The smell of waste was as clear to them as sight, and conversations could be picked out from beyond sight or hearing of the conversants. The Nephilim, refined by a hellish upbringing in their dark nursery, were endowed with senses rivalling those of even the foreign machinery they observed.
            Nephilim were used to killing other living things for food and excelled in coordinating the hunt. Though they possessed immense strength, they knew and accepted their limits and found ways to compensate and catch their quarry nonetheless. They could overcome the mammoth and the Jotun, and they could overcome mankind.
            They recognized that their traditional strength was weak in comparison. A Nephilim could easily rip a human in half, even one of the hypersexualized, animesque security automations patrolling the streets or accompanying politicians, who in that day and age were one and the same as businessmen. But a Nephilim could not endure the many and terrible weapons that could be used against their kind. They could not club this foe to death like any ordinary beast. But even hunting beasts was rarely so simple as just swinging a club.
            Like with any vast, unknown wilderness, there is the urge to explore. The newcomers, equipped with heavy duty drones and hovercraft, soon began to explore the vast, surrealistic wilderness that the Nephilim calls home. What followed was the urge to feel the volcanic soil on their feet, breath in the clean, warming air, hike alongside the melting glaciers and gawk at the pods of fifty-ton Jotun.
            Here the landlords were waiting. They had been listening to conversations from afar and had, over the past years, begun attempting communication. They were slow and peaceful, gentle in their movements, which was easy as Nephilim were fast only in their heads. This gentle giant façade was easily appealing. Humans took a liking to them. They learned fast.
            Just as they had mastered the body language of animals and the clicking, pheromone-ridden dialect of Atrox Sapients in the past, they learned human. They could not speak it, as they lacked proper lips and tongues. Instead they possessed a long, prehensile proboscis and a hollow, bony, tubelike extension of their nostrils. Their voices were flutes and trumpets, permeated by internal clicks and rumbles. They understood what man said and taught him to understand what they said. It was an extensive and exhausting process, as the speech patterns of Nephilim were lengthy semblances of song, nearly unbroken, and a slight change in pitch could shift the meaning entirely. Humans spoke fast and spaced between their words. They focused more on solid definitions and less so ideas and emotions, which the Nephilim dialogue tended towards. An entire book could be written detailing how they broke the language barrier, but what matters here is simply that it was done.
            By way of conversation alone, the Nephilim had elevated themselves to the level of proper people in the eyes of the trespassers. The greatest hurdle of the plan had been overcome. They now focused on trade.
            Nephilim had little use for most human things (besides paint and various other artistic supplies, as well as blankets, which they enjoyed for comfort). Trade instead was a means to power. With it they could integrate themselves into the society of humankind and thus clear a path to roles ever higher up on the political ladder. They themselves knew already of trade and politics, but it was primarily limited to managing prey stocks and relationships between different families. An actual cohesive group of Nephilim was generally close in relation biologically (or a group of adolescents newly independent of their parents), but they were in communication of any number of their kind at one time, speaking with friends hundreds of miles off. This long-rage social life was easily facilitated by their wide, open habitats: flat plains that allowed sound to travel without obstruction.
            This had always been so, but they grew much more closely knit upon the arrival of humanity. It was not long before the Nephilim, easily united in their relatively small number, had established their own authorities, individual positions, and political hierarchy. Each had a role in the plan. Even the babies, who often had an appeal with tourists and contributed significantly simply by being cute. The great minds, long smothered by cold and darkness, were at last free to explode into the intellectual operations they so hungrily desired.
            They knew the invaders, often destructive as they were, would not harm peaceful natives, and they would not take their homes or livelihoods. Though they were obviously exploiting the planet, there were some laws or moral precedents that conveniently gave the Nephilim a crack in the door to squeeze their way through and into power.
            The hot springs and accompanying geysers were a popular destination. As such, their massive proprietors begun charging tourists to bathe there. Young mammoths and rhinos (much cuter and chubbier than their elders) were taken from the herds so tourists could take pictures with them and feed them buckets of algae. A similar procedure was done with particularly fat Quattors, Drumjaww calves, and the bleached skeletons of immense marine wyrms. They arranged themselves as tour guides and stewards of the wilderness, which had suddenly gained value far beyond living space and food.
            Native artifacts were in high demand owing to their exotic nature and the human love of souvenirs and trinkets. After all, who wouldn’t want to own something made by an alien? Nephilim sold carved bones and smaller (as so a human could hold them) versions of their immense weaponry. Musical instruments, carved stones, clay sculptures, capes made from alien hide, all was sold for prices far exceeding their worth. From the funds they would commission special vehicles (which was much easier than walking everywhere) as well as the numerous electronics that facilitated access to the internet and social media. Also television, for what they deemed “research purposes”.
            Captured megafauna was transported in the new vehicles and sold for attractions at zoos (only natives were, by laws not even of their making, allowed to capture native wildlife). These fetched exorbitant prices and drew more attention to the endemic fauna and the Nephilim themselves.
            Nephilim art, taken in with the rest of the money laundering that was high-end art, fetched extraordinary prices. These artists, as all Nephilim were, found themselves making many connections with the elite by way of their work. The ideology behind it disturbed them, but like everything else they had done it was suffered willingly to achieve the end result.
            It was small, and they were distant from the newcomers, but the gap was closing rapidly, and it was that they had established relations with them that put them on edge, far above the Atrox Sapients, who generally lacked the intellect or willpower to even try. By virtue of human advances in ethics and civil rights the Nephilim were protected in a way that seemed unlikely given human nature and their technological superiority. It was by that goodness that allowed them to slowly integrate themselves into society and secure themselves in a world of potential rivals that would otherwise decimate them. There were few Nephilim left, but by their wits and cunning they would make themselves strong again.
            They began amassing money and power. Social media was revolutionary in this. It seemed people were quite fascinated with the alien giants and their bizarre antics. They enjoyed watching them, and it humanized them even further. They would, for added appeal, take on the trends and topics humans liked, at least the ones they could tolerate. The electric world became a powerful weapon. With it the Nephilim could raise awareness to the supposed plight of their world: the mass-dumpings of biowaste, the half-starved Atrox Sapients picking through trash, the pollution of the algae marshes and tidal flats. A brief video of a desperate baby Nephilim, positioned rather cinematically atop a floating heap of plastic refuse in the middle of a polluted waterway and rescued by a couple of do-gooders who would then clean it off and speak of the plight their kind faced, that alone was far stronger than any missile or armored vehicle.
            It brought forth the notion that human influence was ruining the alien world, that the noble savages suffered immeasurably beneath civilization’s shadow and had no say in the policies regarding it. This was a bloodless war, with each victorious battle being a clip of, say, a group of Nephilim offering aid to desperate tribes of Atrox Sapients, cute offspring in tow. They presented themselves as peaceful caretakers of their world, noble benevolences who wanted to better the lives of those suffering around them. This was obviously appealing. People would feel guilty. They had caused the suffering of not just violent, savage animals but fellow people. For in that day and age, despite the widespread corruption and cruelty seen in civilization, people could for the most part recognize something with comparable mental capacity as a person. They had grown to love the Nephilim and cared for their plight.
            Unsurprisingly, then, the Nephilim managed to weasel their ways into politics. They had lots of money, seeing as they did not need to pay for electricity or running water or rent. Compared to drab bureaucrats and mildly charismatic (at best) businessmen, a bizarre and exotic alien chieftain fighting for the survival of its people was far more appealing. The notion that it was their world, after all, bubbled back to the surface, and, after all, shouldn’t they have a say in it? People flocked to the idea of governing Nephilim, Nephilim in business, Nephilim as celebrities. One in the same in that world. An ornately-clothed, ten foot alien giant carrying an immense staff made for a highly appealing leader, especially with their sonorous, majestic voices and the intellectual appeal of their words. Nephilim avoided the puzzling word salads of human politicians, which appealed to those who actually bothered to listen to speeches. To everyone else, the description above easily surpassed a corrupt old man.
            A century or so after human arrival, the Nephilim had essentially taken over the politics and business of their world, punctuated by a few closely-allied humans, and a genetically engineered, uplifted Triceratops. They were agreeable leaders, even if there was a bit of lingering xenophobia. Things were managed well.
            Nephilim differed from humans in many ways. One of the more subtle, but perhaps the most defining, was the difference in their thinking. The human mind was infested with an urge to conquer, to dominate. Like dragons, many humans horded power and wealth purely for the sake of it. There were obsessions with status and wealth. A human wanted to be above others for the pure sake of power. A Nephilim was only motivated to power to protect their interests. They did not care for wealth or possessions unless they needed them. As the human was made weak, it was insecure and sought to shelter itself with wealth and titles. The Nephilim, born with its immense strength and resilience, did not care. They did not mind rain or their preferred nudity (they wore clothes for the sake of appearances) or their general lack of shelter.
            In the first place, they had only planned and succeeding in their plan because they wanted security. A few hundred of them against millions of humans and Atrox Sapients. They found themselves a vulnerable minority and sought to put themselves in a place where their interests would be protected. They needed the safety to repopulate and create their art. Of course, they were used to strength, and fearing little else. Introspective as they were, the Nephilim did not deny this, and they took pains to make sure they were fair. The trespassers, despite the intrusion and their filth, were not evil and certainly did nothing warranting cruelty. Neither did the Atrox Sapients, and given their understanding of the Atrox tongue the Nephilim far exceeded humanity in managing them.
            They harbored no hatred towards Atrox Sapients and usually liked them. However, Atrox Sapients were as a group unreasonable and nearly impossible to organize. The Nephilim took pains to be fair towards them and ensure them a place in society. The average Atrox Sapient found itself as a laborer of sorts, replacing machines in many places, raising meat animals for the Nephilim’s carnivorous palates, and cleaning up waste. The more composed served as security guards and operated public vehicles. If they were capable, they were given the same access to more prolific roles as humans and Nephilim were. As most Atrox Sapients only desired food, comfort, and time to roughhouse, they were fine with this.
            It was good. Nephilim were not for luxury and served their roles as needed so as to allow the world around them to function properly. They did not care for profit outside of its necessity in the supply of essentials, they did not care for politics outside of its use in maintaining their power. All was a means to an end. Nephilim in their strength wanted little in the way of wealth or status. They merely wanted to stay comfortable and safe so that they could make their art. Given their name, one could assume they did, to some degree, possess divine natures. That of course was wrong, but many Nephilim did not consider their work art and instead simply preferred calling it creation. In a sense, then, they were perhaps trying to rival God. They wanted to make it not splatters on a canvas or shaped clay but real, ever hungry for a medium more powerful, more tangible. Drawing became writing and song and that grew into film. Nephilim film was different than human film. It was rarely coherent, being a menagerie of intellectual musings, half-baked philosophy, and splattered colors and musical echoes. One moment might depict a worm gorging on refuse and the next be a hallucinogenic river of embryonic fluid oozing down the screen. Nephilim did not care so much for plots as beauty and ideas.
            Genetic engineering was a powerful thing. It had been used for progressively more elaborate reasons over the centuries. What was once fatter, faster-growing chickens and sweeter fruit became supposedly ethically grown biomass that tasted like fine meat and lacked any consciousness so as to warrant protests of cruelty. Animals were taken and developed into monstrous caricatures of televised antagonist beasts: dragons and dinosaurs and Saturday morning kaiju that fought each other to the death in arenas. Like anything that made a lot of money, concerns over animal cruelty went unheeded, concerns over exploiting cloned human beings for monster parts were buried beneath paperwork, and the occasional mauling was silenced with money. The escape of a particularly erratic asset that caused millions of dollars in damage and released a potent pathogen was troublesome at best but did not thwart the business.
            Nephilim were far less corrupt. They banned the practice and found other ways to make money off of giant monsters. At least one or two particularly wealthy ones adopted assets as pets. As for genetic engineering in general, they incorporated it into their art extensively.
            It was not long, relative to it all, that one could behold any number of non-Euclidean, tottering abominations morphing and shifting through the streets, flanked by floating globules of inflated biomass and parades of innumerable beings that could more exactly be described as living things. Pianos walked the streets with tubas and drums. They did not look to be their namesakes but they spoke with the same voices. Walls were alive with sheets of glimmering biofilm and liquid protein. Colossi rumbling outside urban limits devoured waste and reduced it to compost, causing the wild ecosystems to bloom.
            Nephilim-made architecture was monolithic and artistically utilitarian. Buildings were stone and metal in composition and took up pyramids, spheres, and pillars in shape. The cities began to look as if they were drawn by Zdzislaw Beksinski. Cultured growths of pillar trees, resembling nightmarish stacks of femurs and clubs, rose up and crawled alongside walls while skin-like sheet algae covered roofs. This was intentional: the Nephilim grew things and formed things to work alongside the city. The music beasts and their compatriots by pre-formed nature only walked certain paths, never reproducing beyond desirability and never leaving the limits of civilization. The wild places stayed wild as the sun renewed life. Awakened by light, the festering plains of algae and stretches of creaking pillar trees filled themselves with ever-greater numbers of native fauna.
            The human presence gradually lessened. The Nephilim were by no means oppressive, and their creations lacked any form of menace. But it was becoming their world, reflecting their eyes, their ears, their tastes. Their population had exploded, and the Atrox Sapients outnumbered man and Nephilim combined. The natives were making the new buildings and the new entertainment. They had worked themselves into the system and were no longer just running it. They were remaking it. It became them.
            Eventually humanity and its allies would only do necessary business with that world. It produced various foods and metals and a good share of abstract art as well as animals for zoos. By then, interest in the native fauna had subsided. For as abstract and terrifying as the planet’s beasts were, what mad beings their sapient minds could dream up were exponentially more unknowable. In due time the former shining colonies had become a series of monstrous corpse cities: oozing, creaking labyrinths patrolled by any number of eldritch things and permeated with music that expressed emotions foreign to human minds. Waterways cut between massive communal housing resembling blocks of stone, navigated by stocks of swimming creations as well as citizens merrymaking on their equivalents of boats and pool toys.
            A red sky and black moon looked down upon the vast and unmovable pillars, surrounding by stinking grey plains spreading out into the horizon. The howls and groans of unholy beings echoed across the humid air, and within the dank sanctitude of their monoliths the Nephilim and Atrox Sapients worked away at making more. They of course had long since taken to the stars, mostly to engage in trade (biomass cultivated from terrestrial algae was a major export, being something along the lines of that time’s equivalent of flour or rice). But unlike many other races, they did not spread. The focus was on maintaining their home planet. Rather than power, they wanted utopia, and though the Nephilim were smart enough to know that it was unattainable, they nonetheless worked towards the next best thing and achieved it.
            What had been dubbed, among many names, “The Physical Hell”, was their heaven. They had food aplenty. They were safe from the cold. Human interference had blessed them with technology that their world could never have produced otherwise. Now they were left alone, their planet just productive enough to ensure a good quality of life, but not so much that it would be a prime target for conquest. In the event that it was, they were well-armed, and much of the living art doubled as weapons of immeasurable power. Guarded by their very own angels, surrounded by their very own Garden of Eden, the Nephilim had come back from the brink and attained what could be described as the state of gods. They had fashioned the world in their image. A dark infant realm of hellish monstrosities and rumbling, screaming air. It spoke an evil nature and resembled Hell, but they and their Atrox Sapient companions had another name for it:
            Paradise.