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Once they dropped the kill to the ground, they brandished crude tools – perhaps the weapons from their battle days – and chopped it into large hunks. These pieces were then divided, going first to the hunters, and then to the others. Oddly, there was no single Ettin I could identify in the role of leadership. Such was our distance from these creatures, however, that I may have missed spoken verbal cues.
I had seen these creatures during the reign of Korax. In the span of merely a decade, how could these brutal monsters live a reasonably docile existence? My question was answered the following day. We observed another group of Ettin stumble upon the colony we were watching. It appeared accidental, for the new group made a confused display and attempted to retreat. The original band immediately beset the newcomers and there was a grisly battle. Some newcomers lived and escaped, but the others were soon divided and eaten as the kill from the previous night.
It was then that I surmised that the remaining Ettin of the world had banded together into isolated tribes – a common repetition seen in the start of a civilization. My worries were somewhat abated: our need to eradicate them entirely was no longer of pressing importance. They were not the organized force they had been under Korax. If it was not uncommon for tribes to meet each other, I thought, we could track their movements in order to discover all the remaining creatures. Thus, in the future, we would have adequate knowledge should we decide that they required culling. Whether my scholarly desires conclude satisfactorily will remain to be seen: the hunting party was extremely reluctant to leave them be and allow my study to continue. This view, no doubt, is shared by the rest of the world.
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