As it turned out, getting a few Giants to move as one wanted them to was, amusingly, fairly simple. They liked the small and somewhat comfortable shelters they usually built for themselves, but ultimately, their primary concern was food. With that in mind, I simply showed them images carefully selected from the numerous things my scrying constructs had observed and used those images to let them know where food could be found.

Or at least the illusion of abundance. Not that food was sparse where we were headed, the game was just as plentiful there as it was here, but that was it. There was no more or less food in that area; the only difference was that I could assist the few giants I had selected to take along. Hopefully, my help would be sufficient to make them complacent until the things I was teaching them made all the difference and they turned from simple savages into somewhat civilised beings. It was a long road to travel, both geographically and metaphorically, but I had some hope for it to work out.

Adding to that small deception, I liberally sprinkled some compulsions into the minds of suitable giants, pushing and prodding them to follow my directions, even if I had not worked with any giant but Naya. The others had been chosen based on my small family's observations, with even Silva and Sasha weighing in on the matter in their own, growling manner. It was somewhat surreal to realise that Sasha was more intelligent and socially aware than the giants, despite looking like a cross between a dog, a wolf, and some sort of great ape.

Ultimately, I managed to get ten Giants to move alongside us, or at least move in the same general direction as we did at roughly the same time. We had to constantly make sure they didn’t notice us, as even with my lessons and attempts to teach the giants, especially Naya, social cohesion and cooperation as survival tactics, the process was slow-going. We had yet to see what would happen if two giants came across one another, but given their general behaviour, I wasn’t convinced that they wouldn’t get into the same fight-to-mate I had observed before. Or just a fight to the death if it were two males, which would be quite annoying. However, it would be interesting to see what might happen with two females, which was a configuration I had yet to observe.

But I wasn’t all that willing to put these ideas to the test for a fairly simple reason. There were only ten giants, four male and six female, which was a somewhat limited stock if I wanted to maintain a healthy population in the long term. Even with these ten, it would take some selective breeding to avoid genetic troubles, unless those could somehow be assuaged magically, which would be a worthwhile and enjoyable topic of research in and of itself. The research would have to be another collaboration between Luna and either Lia or me, as Luna’s Life and our Blood Magic would be the tool of choice for it, but we’d have to see.

Perhaps we could even use the approach to avoid trouble with a shallow genetic pool, thereby improving the overall material we had to work with. However, that was obviously a long-term project, with multiple preliminary experiments needing to be conducted first.

For now, our focus had to be on the giant migration and the numerous issues that came with it. I was doing my best to keep the giants apart from one another as we were moving, but they had the propensity to wander off when they saw something to hunt. Anything to hunt, really, meaning I had to spread the ten giants out, keeping at least two kilometres between each of them, preferably more than that.

Luckily, while giants were incredibly durable on a physical level, their minds were a major weak point. A weak point I was happily exploiting, I even enlisted Lia's help with my work. Together, we managed to weave a web of illusions, images, and compulsions around the giants, the mesh open enough to let the giants fight and hunt for their food, but tight and restrictive enough to keep them from doing damage to one of their peers or wandering off the path we wanted them to follow. It was highly convenient, allowing us to increase our speed to a certain extent; however, we were still travelling far slower than my little family of five could.

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Granted, it worked out fairly well, as Lia couldn’t travel at our normal speed during the day, meaning she was moving almost as slowly as the giants did, mainly because she had to constantly carry a large parasol I had made for her. The thing was, quite frankly, utterly ridiculous; it was almost a portable house with a dense weave hanging down from the top of what would keep the sun or rain out in a normal parasol or umbrella. The weave made sure that no sun could slip past to scorch Lia, but it also hindered her sight, slowing her down in the process. The stupid thing was also quite heavy, though not too bad for somebody with Lia’s impressively superhuman physique. Still, its presence and cumbersome nature meant Lia was nearly unable to fight while carrying it, not that there was a whole lot of fighting going on.

With the giants spread all around us, a necessity when it came to keeping them apart, nothing living remained willingly in our path. If anything stuck around, it was almost certainly caught by one of the giants and turned into a meal, their habit to feast on the raw flesh of their kills one I had yet to break. Sure, I had shown all of them images of their respective bodies lying prone in whatever shelter they had constructed for themselves, the bodies shaking from pain, I had even included the scent of vomit and diarrhoea, but it hadn’t worked just yet. Maybe the mental and visual link between the eating of fresh, raw meat and the sickness wasn’t clear or strong enough yet, or they simply believed that the images didn’t come true because they hadn’t come true just yet.

Perhaps I should ensure that those images came true to some degree, just to drive home the dual point of the vision being infallible and the consumption of raw meat being hazardous to one’s health.

Which is coincidentally exactly what happened over the next few days. The giants saw a vision of them eating one of their kills without cooking the meat first, and if they ate it anyway, they got violently ill the next day. Making them ill was a bit of a challenge; the suckers had some serious cast-iron guts, but with a sufficient application of Blood Magic, it was quite doable. Now, I only needed to repeat this particular lesson.

Maybe this was a procedure I should apply to the giants on a general principle, especially when it came to the lessons and teachings on spiritual and social matters. If they didn’t heed my advice, I could demonstrate to them that acting against my lessons was not in their best interest. A divine punishment of sorts, only applied from a much closer distance than the usual divine punishment.

No lightning smiting them from a clear sky for me, just nightmares, whispers, and fears; it was much more suitable to my personality anyway. Perhaps I could even include Lia in this; it might give her and any future vampires a certain stake and position within the society I plan to build.

But first, with the forcible inclusion in cooking and roasting in the giant’s meal planning, I also needed to add a certain amount of teaching regarding tool usage, especially when it came to carrying things. Some of the giants had already learned to conserve some of the meat they managed to hunt for later times. Now, I only had to teach them to cook or roast the entire kill and carry what they couldn’t eat outright along with them to eat later.

For that, I also had to teach them how to prepare a simple pack from the hides of their kills. These were simple constructions to sling around their shoulders, nothing fancy and certainly nothing enchanted, but it worked out well enough.

The next step might be to have giants pair up and collaborate. The problem was that such collaboration needed suitable tasks. I could see it work if one or more giants had to pair up to take down an especially strong foe, or maybe I could encourage collaboration once the different giants demonstrated different talents, so each of them could specialise in a different direction, thus demonstrating the value of teamwork and social cohesion to them.

This would truly take some time, but hopefully, it would work out in the end. Or I might be wasting a whole lot of time.